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Genro Lee Milton, Sensei is the resident teacher and abbot of Endless Mountain Zendo. His formal Zen studies began in 1976 with Eido Shimano Roshi of The Zen Studies Society by whom he was ordained and trained as a Zen monk in the Rinzai Zen tradition. Genro served as resident director of New York Zendo, Shobo-ji in New York City (1981-1988) and Plum Tree Zendo in Philadelphia (1988-1998). He came to Stillwater in 1998 to establish Endless Mountain Zendo. In a ceremony conducted by Jiro Andy Afable Osho of Wild Goose Zendo, Genro was acknowledged as a Dharma teacher within the Rinzai Zen school. Genro has also presented Zen to many academic, religious and special interest groups.

Message from Genro:

Who Dreams?

We go to sleep and a dream appears. It could be anything: Familiar and unfamiliar people come and go and interact with us. We may see landscapes, cities, distant galaxies, or a busy market place. We converse and we react to things that are said and done, and we may experience emotions of fear, happiness, love, or hatred - anything is possible. From our point of view, the scene has color, sound, depth and breadth. And, as in our wakeful consciousness, we experience the people and places of our dream as separate from ourselves. We haven't a clue what will happen next and - the beings we encounter are unpredictable.  We can't see into the minds of our dream companions. They seem to operate independently of us just as in daily life. And then we wake up and think, "I had a dream."

We've just experienced a 3-dimensional world with color, sound, and feeling. We've experienced the relationship of subject-object - the dreamer and the dreamed.

But if we look at our dream and ask, "Where did that dream happen?" we realize, in spite of appearances, that it happened nowhere. Our dream had no dimension or location. The solidity of the dream beings and places we experienced were equally insubstantial. When awake, we know that our dreams are baseless and empty. We know the sound and color was pure imagination with no vibration, physical light or spectrum - No ear to hear or eye to see. And if we ask, "What about our perception that there were others, that
there were people and places outside our self?" we can see that the "others" in our dream were not separate from us at all. They were our mind. They happened in one consciousness, an indivisible mind perception. It played out in a colorless, soundless, dimensionless consciousness where separation
cannot be. And all that happened in this dream happened without effort or struggle; all was weightless, empty and spontaneously born in emptiness. Without doer or volition, things were done and someone or something appeared to do it. All was absolutely convincing.

So it is now in this world of wakefulness. All is absolutely convincing. We look out into the world and are conscious of it, but we feel that we are visitors in a place external to ourselves. We can see it, hear it, feel it and occupy space within it, and only to that degree do we experience integration.  But the twain between self and others, we think, can never meet. The division of things is fundamental to our ordinary way of
perceiving things, and we accept the reality and solidity of experience without question.  We take for granted the view that "I am" and "things are as they appear to be".

But all is dream, and all that we may say of our sleeping consciousness is true of the wakeful one. Nothing is fixed in thought or in the external world. Nothing abides. All is in constant transformation like a drifting
cloud. Something, a dreamer, imagines a world of depth and breadth, of sight and hearing, of heat and cold, a pageant of endless possibilities. Ideas come up, and the dreamer clings to them. It is in this activity of grasping and holding that a sense of self is born; for an "I" to be, there must be an "other". Thus, in grasping and naming, the indivisible essence of Mind is divided into two -  here and there, real and unreal, being and non-being. In naming the manifestations of consciousness and abiding in this sense of
knowledge, we are lost in its complexity and subject to its fortunes and misfortunes. As things arise, we, the witnesses, bind ourselves to them, and, thus, we suffer. 

If we doubt that things are as they appear to be the question is, "Then, what are they?" If we doubt that things are as they appear to be, we find we cannot resolve our doubt by relying upon the appearances in question. That is, if we want to know who is behind a mask, it won't help to keep looking at the disguise. It has to be removed. If appearances are of no use, discard them: Appearances are all things known either external or internal. Find the one who dreams and thinks, the one who is watching, naming and knowing.
Leave thoughts and knowing alone.

If we look into our minds to find the one who is thinking, we will discover there is no one as such to find, that the essential one is elusive. But still, something perceives. What is it? In time, we exhaust our tendencies to seek it in form and reasoned explanations.

See the thoughts and appearances that drift in consciousness as clouds obscuring the light, and search your mind for their origin. Our habit of grasping and self-identification is deep and, thus, our efforts at uprooting must be firm and dedicated. As we investigate, cutting through the resistance of habit, we become clear and open and our tendencies to name and grasp weaken. We become aware, having a view independent of the empty play of thought and phenomena. Long cherished attachments lose their attraction
and so, too, the suffering and discontent that comes with wandering about within them. Still, we look dispassionately into mind, discarding whatever trace appears. The clouds vanish allowing the light to shine unobstructed. In this light of Wisdom, we discover that there is no one, no past, no future and no present between. All plays out in emptiness. This understanding comes all by itself.  Life and death are the insubstantial fabric of dream.  All is one Mind. We are the "something" we have sought for all along.

Ordinarily, we seek special circumstances that bring happiness and relief from suffering and discontent, and we spend our days struggling to patch things up. We try to control the flow of things, not realizing that there is no one in control and that those things happen as they will. We resist the "what is" of life, and it becomes a battle. We think we know what we are and we have the knowledge to make our way, however haplessly, through time. We love and hate and wish to possess things that we know may slip away. We are fearful beings and jealous. The love we find causes pain. Happiness and satisfaction are fleeting. It is, to put it mildly, a precarious dream.

The things we find the deepest joy in are the things that bear some indication of a greater truth. They are those things that hint of something profound, that shake us from our habitual self-centeredness to reveal a
taste of the unconditional. In these moments we forget ourselves and, perhaps, intuit the truth that all things are united and feel a sense of transcendent compassion or have a glimpse of wisdom that wakes us up for at least a moment. These are gaps in the play of form, gaps that indicate that things are not what they seem. In whatever way these gaps and glimpses come, they are pure grace, the grace of the unknowable. If you wish to know your true teacher, your guru, listen to its wordless voice. Look into the gaps. Find the dreamer.

May All Beings Attain True Peace

 

Endless Mountain Zendo, 104 Hollow Road, Stillwater, PA 17878

 

 

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