PNTV: Big Mind Big Heart by Genpo Roshi (#30)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do an episode on one of my favorite teachers, Zen master Genpo Roshi's great book, Big Mind, Big Heart. So Genpo's incredible. We've got his great book here. We've got my six page Philosopher's Notes PDF we're using as our guide and good guy. So I first was introduced to his work at an Integral Institute seminar hosted by Ken Wilbur and his folks. And Genpo led us through this Big mind work, which is extraordinary. And then when I read his book, just felt even more in love with what he's up to and how he articulates this process of living from a big mind versus a small, puny little mind. So we're going to look at a few of my favorite big ideas here and quickly. Contextually, Genpo is a Zen master. He's been doing this stuff for decades and he's been working on the Big Mind process for the better part of the last decade or so. And I'm not going to go into detail on that in the note, but check out Big Mind. I believe it's bigmind.org for more on Genpo and his work. What I want to do is talk about the essence of Big Mind and how we can take some steps to get closer to that starting today. So here are a few my favorite big ideas from this book. First, the idea of big mind versus. He doesn't call it small mind, but kind of think of contracted mind. Right? The fundamental idea here is that when we're living from big mind, we have a spacious perspective. We're not locked into any one narrow perspective now. Too often we go through our day to day lives and thinking that our perspective is the only one. We're 100% right and someone who doesn't agree with us is 100% wrong. Well, that leads to a lot of suffering. Being stuck like that is essentially just a great recipe for a lot of suffering. So he's got some great ways to describe that. And Buddhists call it right view. There's a story that I share in the note that I think brings the point home really well. And, and imagine, you might have heard this before, but imagine a bunch of blind people, blind men, right, who've never seen an elephant before and they're blind and they're each given a different part of the elephant to touch and then describe what an elephant is. So one guy touches the tail, they're like feeling the tail and they're like, oh, an elephant is like a rope. And another guy feels a leg, and he's like a rope. What are you talking about? An elephant is like a pillar. It's like a tree trunk, a big tree trunk. And someone else takes the ear and is feeling the ear, and they're like, no, no, no. What are you guys talking about? An elephant is like a fan, right? You kind of wave it. It's a fan. And they all go through different parts, and they'll have different experiences. Now they're all convinced they're 100% right, and they can't understand how someone else could have a different perspective. And we often get in trouble when we, like the blind men, think that our perspective is the only perspective not a good idea. So the idea of big mind is to become more spacious, to raise the threshold of our mind so we can see more perspectives. Another great way that Genpo brings this to life is an idea. He says it's like having a Maserati. You know those fast cars, A Ferrari, whatever. If you have any car, but it's stuck in first gear or in reverse or in second gear or fifth gear or whatever, it doesn't matter how great your car is, if it's stuck in one gear, it doesn't work. It sucks, right? So again, we can be stuck in reverse, always looking backwards. We can be stuck in first, never willing to take risks or kind of go a little faster, or we can be stuck in fifth, never able to slow down and relax. And what we want to do is to be able to move fluidly throughout, right? That's the whole idea here. And big mind is a process to help us do that. So I just love that vision. And that brings us into the actual word for suffering in Buddhism. And again, Genpo's a Zen Buddhist monk and teacher. So the word suffering translated as suffering in Buddhist Sanskrit texts is dukkha, right? Dukkha. Now, that word literally means to be stuck. And it comes from a word that describes a wheel that stuck. The hub, the center of the wheel doesn't turn. That's dukkha, right? And the Buddha says that is suffering. When we're stuck, when we're like a wheel that can't turn, we're attached to something going the way we want. Life happened. It didn't go the way we want, and we're stuck. We can't move. Sukha is the opposite, where a wheel is spinning. And what we want to do is get fluid with life, to move through life gracefully and effortlessly without getting stuck, whether it's in first Gear or thinking that our perspective is the complete perspective. So really cool stuff. So those are some ideas of why we want to consider Big Mind. And now we'll look at a few other and see what we can get through in the next five minutes. So Genpo has an awesome quote in here that I share in the note where he says that we need to look at our lives as our temple. In his world, our lives are the temple. The temples have no walls. It's not like you go to temple or go to church or go to your yoga studio or whatever it is you do for spirituality, and that's your temple and your spiritual practice. We need to break down those walls and realize that every moment is an opportunity to practice our spirituality again. We talk about that again and again and again. But imagine that the temple without walls. Isn't that amazing? I love that. So the Big Mind process, in a very small nutshell, is a process that Genpo goes through where we essentially interview different Personas, different voices we have in our heads, in our consciousness. And we see that we have a lot of voices, right? We've got the voice of the child and the voice of the greedy one and the voice of the compassionate one, the voice of the generous one. All these different voices that play different roles. Many of them are stifled. And we don't. We haven't let them out of the closet in a long time. And every once in a while, they come out and they yell, right? We don't want that. We don't want. We want to have a comprehensive holistic relationship where we see that they all have a place to play and we get more and more spacious, so we have more and more room to let them play, right? Versus when we get tight, they tend to come out and do wacky stuff. So his process really helps us kind of get to that. And it's kind of like he says, having a company. Imagine having a company where you hire all kinds of people. You literally hire hundreds of people. You don't even know how many people you hire, and you didn't even give them job descriptions. You didn't even tell them who they work for. But you've got all these people running around doing who knows what right now, the big mind process is kind of like going into that dysfunctional company of our minds. We've got all these employees working and starting to interview them, getting clear on who does what, and starting to set up kind of a hierarchy so you know who reports to who. So you've got some more structure. I love the way of that way of looking at what he does. We talk about it in the note. How much time do we have? We've got a couple minutes. So we'll talk about a couple other ideas I love. He talks about the idea of integrated masculine and feminine compassion. So a lot of times it's easy or right. Either we're soft and nurturing, kind of the yin of compassion. And that's pretty much what compassion is. We don't have any masculine compassion that we can bring to the world. Right. So there's no way you can ever do anything, ever violent if you're loving and you're living from one part of compassion, feminine compassion. But he invites us to look at the whole picture and see that sometimes we've got to have a ruthless masculine compassion. And we can do so from a place of love and from a place of transcendence. I talk about this in the note and I'm going to talk about it a lot more. It's a big idea. Integrated feminine and masculine compassion. If we only have feminine compassion, we can never be aggressive with our love. We can never set really clear boundaries or even Buddhists have stories. One that we talk about in Pema Chodron's the Places that Scare you, Places that Scare Us. Great book. Tells a story of a monk who kills someone compassionately. That's a powerful idea. How do you do that? Well, you've got to hold both feminine and masculine compassion. It's a big idea. And if you only have feminine compassion, that's idiot compassion. It's only partial truth. So anyway, that's a big idea. We'll talk about more. And we've got a couple other really beautiful descriptions of the highest self within us, the true self that integrates the dual, the non dual, and all the other things that are going on in our lives. So that's a really quick look at this great book. And he ends with a question of I end the note. Can you imagine a world where we're living from this place of integration with compassion and service and generosity and kindness and true expansion? It's a beautiful place, requires all of us to expand to get there. So let's do it. Hope you enjoyed more soon. See ya.