Good evening. So a few of you I know and a lot of you I don't know. My name is Yvonne Rand and I live over the fence at the bottom of Green Gulch on the other side of the alder wood behind the Pelican Inn. Coming up here this evening there was a big great horned owl on the telephone wire above what I suppose is these days called maybe the Fifth Field with his head swiveling in the mist. Very beautiful. This wonderful soft warm fog. It's a beautiful evening. I would this evening like to talk a little bit and hopefully have some conversation together

[01:08]

about the mind, the ever-present and wonderful mind. And what I would like to talk about has to do with the cultivation of equanimity. How we get to have that quality of mind. So what I'd like to do is to read a passage from one of the sutras from this wonderful quite new translation of the Long Discourses of the Buddha translated by Maurice Walsh which I hope you all know called Thus Have I Heard. It's a marvelous translation. So lively and fresh and informed by the scholarship of this century. I wish Maurice Walsh was a little younger and I hope he lives a long time so he translates many things. He's for those of you who are reading, studying the Shantideva text with Norman, he's translated

[02:14]

new commentary on the Shantideva text. So let's just pray that wisdom gets the money together to publish it. So what I'd like to do this evening is to read a short passage and say a few words about some of the inevitable Buddhist lists. And then I'd like to tell you a story about Allen Ginsberg who taught a class in the context of a workshop that I did in New York recently. But to pinpoint the mind that I'm interested in looking at let me give you a personal example. I did something illegal this evening. I parked behind the kitchen mostly because this afternoon there was a no parking sign on the driveway and I just thought, oh, I'll just do what I did before.

[03:15]

And I have this kind of eagle eye for things that could be used for other things. So when I was here this afternoon I saw this wonderful, huge, deep pot. It looks like it might have been designed for the chocolate, what I think is now used for the wok in the kitchen, but that was originally used for melting chocolate, maybe in a bakery or something like that. Anyway, there's this wonderful pot behind the wok here that's like this. And I immediately had pot greed when I saw it. I thought, wouldn't it be great for a fish pond in the garden? The mind is so wonderful. It goes immediately to such surprising and fanciful places. So this afternoon I had a little niggling of that's an awfully nice pot. It looks sort of like it's thrown away.

[04:18]

I could feel myself entering into that category called taking what is not given. And then I thought, no, no, no, it's not thrown away, it's stored back there. But what I was aware of was how easily, how quickly my mind was working with some way of justifying taking the pot home and turning it into a goldfish pond. Just like that, in a moment, I saw this pot and look where I went with it. So that's what I'd like to talk about tonight, is that capacity in our mind to have certain kinds of thoughts and attitudes and conditions. So let me begin with this passage from one of the sutras in this collection.

[05:22]

This is from the Supreme Net. And the sutra goes as follows. I'm reading on page 68 in Thus Have I Heard. Monks, if anyone should speak in disparagement of me, of the Dharma or of the Sangha, you should not be angry, resentful or upset on that account. If you were to be angry or displeased at such disparagement, that would only be a hindrance to you. For if others disparage me, the Dharma or the Sangha, and you are angry or displeased, can you recognize whether what they say is right or not? No, Lord. If others disparage me, the Dharma or the Sangha, then you must explain what is incorrect as being incorrect, saying, that is incorrect, that is false, that is not our way.

[06:27]

That is not found among us. But monks, if others should speak in praise of me, of the Dharma or of the Sangha, you should not on that account be pleased, happy or elated. If you were to be pleased, happy or elated at such praise, that would only be a hindrance to you. If others praise me, the Dharma or the Sangha, you should acknowledge the truth of what is true, saying, this is correct, that is right, that is our way, that is found among us. I think it's a very interesting passage. The Buddha is saying not to be moved around by praise or censure. So the list that I want to reference this evening is the list described as the Eight

[07:32]

Worldly Attitudes. And the Eight Worldly Attitudes are described as the preoccupation of gain and loss, with fame or obscurity, with pleasure or pain, with praise or censure. And that any of these preoccupations lead to some upset in our equanimity. They disturb our equanimous mind. And, of course, we want to cultivate equanimity because it is equanimity of mind that allows us to see clearly. Seeing clearly being described as seeing accurately what is correct and what is incorrect, which

[08:35]

in turn leads to our being able to distinguish accurately one thing from another, and is critical in the cultivation of morality. So the example that I gave you about the pot, what's critical is not my having this thought about the pot, this flashing of pot greed, or maybe I could say goldfish pond greed, but how I respond to, how I hold that thought. All right. The story I want to tell you on this point is a little bit complicated, and I would bear with you, ask you to bear with me in the process of telling you the story. But let me set the circumstance first.

[09:36]

Some of you may know or know of Natalie Goldberg, who wrote a book called Writing Down the Bones, which is a book she wrote as a consequence of her studying Zen practice with Dainen Katagiri Roshi, who was a teacher at the Zen Center for a long time, and subsequently went to Minnesota where he started the Minnesota Zen Center. And that's where Natalie knew him. And she, as an extension of her practice and study with Katagiri Roshi, she turned, she found a way to turn writing into a yoga, a physical practice. And she and I have co-led several workshops combining Zen practice with writing practice and had a wonderful time. And so we envisioned this week at a place in New York up on the Hudson River called Omega

[10:42]

Institute. That's an old Jewish summer camp. Buddhism has this affinity for old Jewish places. The San Francisco Zen Center started in an old Jewish synagogue on Bush Street, and then we went to the building we have now for the city center. This was not a Jewish summer camp, but could have been. Anyway, Omega Institute has all of the wonders of a really old, well-developed, quite beautiful summer camp. Natalie said, just think of it. We can turn the whole place into a writer's village. So she was going to teach writing. I was going to teach meditation practices. And her running coach was going to be there to teach running. It was a very thinly veiled excuse to hang out with each other, make some money. So when she was in France this summer, she had an accident which involved a big guard

[11:47]

dog that she didn't see lunging at her and biting her leg, taking a section of the leg out of her calf the size of a beer stein, was the way it was described to me. And it hasn't healed very well, although it's now beginning to. Anyway, she got kind of frightened that maybe she would never be able to walk, and more importantly to her, never again be able to sit in meditation if she didn't really take care of her leg. So somewhat at the last minute, she called up and said, I can't do it. 250 people are all signed up, and Natalie says, I can't do it. So the head of Omega Institute freaked out, and Natalie got her good friend, who's a very fine writer, to take her place. But the head of Omega Institute didn't think that we were enough of a draw because none of us are stars.

[12:47]

We're just, you know, brown mice. So he invited as special guest appearances Sharon Olds, Galway Canal, Allen Ginsberg, and Joan Halifax. It was such overkill, I couldn't believe it. And of course what was interesting was that the group of us who showed up actually wanted to meditate run and write, and felt a little intruded on by all these stars, which was in itself rather interesting. We were an intimate group of 200 for a week. It was a quite interesting and wonderful week in a lot of ways. So on a Wednesday afternoon, we began Sunday night. On Wednesday afternoon, Allen Ginsberg arrived in time for lunch. I've known Allen since the 60s. Hadn't seen him since last fall. And he walked into the dining room and I thought, what's happened to Allen?

[13:52]

He's become this old man in less than a year. Well, he'd had heart failure in December. He'd had a terrible, life-threatening flare-up of his diabetes in May. He has high blood pressure and Bell's palsy. So I thought, well, for good reason he's aged in the last 10 months. He, in the afternoon, gave a class. And there are a few things he talked about. One, he talked about this quality of the mind, which is the point of all this, called negative capability, something Keats talks about in the realm of poetry. Talking about that realm of the mind that has to do with uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. And our ability to hold this area of thought and attitude

[14:56]

without any irritable grasping after facts. He also, he had this list of what he called pith instructions. Some of them are great. Notice what you notice. Observe, I love this one, observe what's vivid. Vividness is self-selecting, take what comes. I think that's pretty good also. Oh, I didn't bring my copy of evoking the Bodhisattva's names. Well, that's all right. So, in the afternoon, Alan went through this list of pith instructions. And when he got to unpacking or opening up what Keats is talking about with negative capabilities, he used as an example the following two statements.

[15:58]

He said, as an example, one may have the thought, child molestation is horrible. And then, one may have the thought, child molestation may be enjoyable. There's one woman over here whom I know a little bit, and I saw her just kind of freeze and get up and leave. And about ten minutes later, she came back, and I saw her standing in the back of the room. Just, she looked almost like a statue. And after about maybe twenty more minutes, when there was a little pause in Alan's teaching, she just bellowed at the top of her lungs.

[17:02]

Mr. Ginsburg, I want you never to say those words again. And it was like the whole room was just sprayed with this intense fury. She was really upset and quite angry. Not so surprising, given her history of quite terrible abuse as a child. And over the course of the next maybe half hour, seventy people got up and walked out. Not en masse, but a steady trickle. So maybe another half hour went by. And finally, someone said, Mr. Ginsburg, I am extremely uncomfortable.

[18:04]

Something happened, and we're going on with, you know, business as usual. Can we talk about what happened? And you could feel everybody in the room kind of exhale. So we had some conversation. Alan seemed a little stunned and kind of like he didn't quite know what had happened. And he continued on with his presentation, and in the end said, perhaps my example was unskillful. And I apologize to all of you for having not been more attentive in the example that I gave. And he proceeded in the rest of his class to talk about how important it is

[19:06]

for us to know what arises in the mind and to not edit, to actually be aware of the capacity for the mind to hold simultaneously apparently conflicting or contradictory ideas or thoughts, attitudes. Which is not to say that one acts from those thoughts, but that if one knows what the nature of one's mind, one more accurately has the ability to discriminate about what you act from and what you don't. So by the end of the afternoon, the people who had stayed in the room had a kind of complete picture of where he was going, and whether his example was skillful or unskillful.

[20:07]

I think we all agreed it was not a skillful or appropriate, actually appropriate example. So that evening I met Alan and we went to have supper together, and I realized he was quite kind of disoriented and thrown back on the amount of upset that there was among the group. And I, of course, from the time his class ended and his poetry reading started after dinner, except for the dinner break, was out there on the lawn, you know, helping people process their upset. There was a lot of it. The first group that I sat with in the afternoon after this class, the most upset people came and said, can you help us figure out what's going on here? A lot of people are really having a hard time,

[21:09]

are really upset with what happened in Alan's class, we don't know what to do. So I said, sure, let's meet out on the lawn at 4.30 or whatever, and whoever wants to come and just deal with how you're feeling and what your reaction is, we can do that together. The three, absolutely the three most upset people were three people who weren't there, which I thought was very interesting. They had only heard what had happened second or third or fourth or fifth hand. And two of the three people who hadn't been there had actually gone around and interviewed a number of people to try to sort of get a crosshatching, get a better sense of what was there. They were absolutely the most upset. I thought that was very interesting. So we just kept processing. The next day, more processing.

[22:10]

In our morning writing group, I read Thich Nhat Hanh's poem about Please Call Me By My True Names, which is really about the same territory. I'm a 12-year-old girl just raped by a sea pirate who jumps into the ocean and drowns. And I am a sea pirate whose heart is not yet open to understanding and love. So then a whole new group of people were mad at me and Kate because we had everybody write about a time when I caused harm for another person. And then I read this poem of more. So I think I met with two. We did two more kind of circles in which we sat and just processed what was coming up for people. And I would say within a day and a half,

[23:12]

the group of 200 of us had come to some more settled and considered understanding of what had happened. There were some people who were angry at the woman for shouting and having the whole room filled with her anger. There were some people who were angry with Alan. There were 200 stories about what was going on. And in an interesting way, that was the most comforting piece of what people saw was that there was like a little mini world with each person. If we just took time enough to sit and listen to each other, we began to realize, were we really all in the same room at the same time? Of course, some of us weren't. Some of us were outside taking a nap or going for a swim

[24:13]

or it was too much of a schedule and taking a time out. So the additional piece of this story is an example of what happens when we get excited and we react. We upset ourselves. We cause harm, actually, to our own mind stream. The last piece of the story is that that evening at dinner, Alan said, What happened? I don't understand why everybody's so upset. He seemed a little confused. We talked for quite a while, and there were two things that I realized. One was that I didn't hear anyone in the group over the course of this day and a half. I didn't hear anyone notice that Alan was an aging, unwell person.

[25:21]

Although he certainly gave every evidence of it, and he had introduced himself as, Hello, my name is Alan Ginsberg, and I had my heart stopped in December. I mean, he gave us the information. But that was one of the details that wasn't on the computer screen, so to speak. I thought that was quite interesting. The other thing that I found informative was that Alan told me, I often heard my teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, use this example. Often. So I didn't really think about it. I just used his example. And I thought, How interesting. He used someone else's example. He just took it without really thinking about it much. Always very risky to do.

[26:26]

And as we talked about it, he said, I suppose if I'd thought about it a little bit, if I'd thought about the examples I was going to use, I would have realized that for a group like this, that was not the appropriate example. Even though for purposes of what he was teaching in the class, he certainly made his point. And what happened in that group was exactly what he was teaching about, was what he wanted us to notice. And in the end, everybody got it. It just took a day and a half for everybody to get, Oh, where did I go when I got all excited about the content and I didn't understand this was meant to be an example of something about the mind and how the mind works that can get us into trouble or can be a source of extremely important information. Because of course, if I understand,

[27:29]

if I'm willing to not edit that thought of, Oh, look at that pot. Wouldn't that make a nice fish pond? If I am willing to attend to whatever arises in the mind, then I have this capacity, I have the opportunity to have some equanimity, which allows me to have the kind of discrimination that leads to seeing things accurately and carefully to cultivate my capacity for morality. That is to have the thought and to consciously choose not to act on that thought. This story about what happened in the class with Alan Ginsberg

[28:32]

has been food for thought for me since it happened, which was, what, a week, a week and a half ago? Two weeks ago. And I thought of all the different circumstances in my own life when somebody says something and I get excited and then I'm in trouble. And how if I can stay present and keep listening and paying attention, I have some chance to sort out what is so and to, in time, do the discriminative thinking that I need to do that arises out of clear seeing,

[29:33]

not colored by my reaction, not colored by judging and blaming. One of my favorite stories in this territory is a story some of you may have heard about a monk who is the priest in a temple in a small village. And one day there's a knock at the temple door and the fisherman in the village and his wife are at the temple door with this newborn baby. And they thrust the baby at him with some anger and they say, Here, she's yours. You made her, she's yours. You're a terrible priest. They just read him the riot act. He said, Oh, is that so? And he took the child and he raised her.

[30:37]

And a couple of years later, the couple came back and they said, Oh, we made this terrible mistake. We found out that our daughter is actually in love with the farmer's son and he's actually the father of this child and you've raised her so carefully and so kindly and never said anything against us. And oh, you're so wonderful. Oh, is that so? Exactly the point in this passage that I read to you. I remember the first time I heard that story and I thought, Boy, does that sound like Mars, you know? I can't imagine ever being in that place where someone could be angry and accusatory of me or there would be some big heat

[31:41]

and I wouldn't get all excited and take it on. And one of the things that was quite interesting to me and in a way reassuring of what the Chinese water torture, treatment of slow change, drip, drip, drip. Because, of course, the cultivation of a quantumist's mind is so central in our practice. During this episode at Omega with Alan, although the room was filled with fear, with anger, with the whole range of intense and by and large negative emotion, I was really interested in everything that was happening. I just thought, Wow! Oh!

[32:43]

Oh! I don't know that I've ever been in a situation with that much negative emotional expression and felt so calm. Of course, I wasn't sitting in Alan's seat, but I was someone who was holding the container of the glass. So I was sharing a sort of side hot seat. But it was such a revealing situation in terms of seeing how one's intense response or reaction colors what one can see or what one cannot see. Very informing. The next morning, when a group of us met for a morning sitting after the sitting before breakfast,

[33:44]

we just sat for a minute and just did a quick check-in. Virtually everybody said, Well, I feel better this morning. My mind has settled down. Just the passage of time and I feel better. I remember some years ago, during a particularly difficult time for us in the Sangha, Katyagiri Roshi's advice to all of us was, Don't anybody leave, but sit down and be quiet for six months. And I remember thinking he was stark raving mad. Makes kind of sense to me now. I just couldn't see it at the time. How much happens in a situation where we have very strong and different and difficult notions about what is so?

[34:46]

How much happens if we just stay with each other and are patient? Some of you may know this practice, evoking the Bodhisattva's name from Thich Nhat Hanh. And I've just highlighted certain lines in the two lines of verses that have to do with the Bodhisattva of compassion and the Bodhisattva of wisdom. We evoke your name, Avalokiteshvara, to listen in order to lessen the suffering in the world. To practice listening with all our attention and open-heartedness. To listen without prejudice,

[35:47]

to listen without judging and without reacting. Listening in order to understand. We evoke your name, Manjushri. We aspire to be still and to look deeply into the heart of things and into the hearts of people. To practice looking with all our attention and open-heartedness with unprejudiced eyes, without judging and without reacting. To see and to understand what the roots of ill-being are. And of course, most importantly of all, to be able to listen and to look within, in terms of our own mind-streams. Because for each of us, that's the only mind-stream we can attend. Much as I want to be fussing and messing with someone else's mind-stream,

[36:49]

so far it has been a raging failure. It makes me think of Shantideva's verse in chapter 6, which I think some of you are studying now. Verse 10. Verse 10. Why be unhappy about what I can do something about? And why be unhappy about what I cannot do something about? And how many of us think we can do something about each other's mind-stream? Caught. If I could just get my husband interested in clean. And of course, I'm sure he thinks, if I could just get her to be interested in order. One time, I got tired of cleaning the toilet that Bill uses. We have three toilets in our house. One of them is designated as Bill's toilet.

[37:52]

Of course, we all use the shower, because it's the best shower. But it's still Bill's toilet. And I got tired of cleaning it. I thought, am I cleaning this because I'm a girl? I don't want to clean it just because I'm a girl. I'm going to stop cleaning it and see if he ever cleans it. So, after three weeks, I said, say, Bill, had you noticed that I stopped cleaning your toilet? Nope. I said, oh, my heart sank. He said, why? I said, well, I was getting bugged cleaning the toilet all the time. I just didn't feel like, why should I always be the one cleaning the toilet? He said, oh. I said, how long would it take before you'd see that it was dirty and clean? And he said, probably never. And we had this wonderful conversation in which he made it very clear to me

[38:59]

that he actually didn't mind filth. That it was not on his list. And it never would be, as far as he was concerned. He had no interest in cultivating an interest in filth. But what he really cared about was order. And I had this flash. I can beat on him for as long as either of us is alive, and I'm probably not going to get anywhere. And of course, what was wonderful was, he said, I'm also not interested in having you clean the toilet that I use, if you don't want to. I'm willing to pay somebody to do my share of the cleaning, so you don't have to do your share and my share. But me, I'm not cleaning. I'm doing other things, making enough money to pay somebody to clean. But me, not cleaning. I think it was one of those conversations which has allowed us to stay married happily to each other.

[40:00]

Because I had this very clear insight, I am not in charge of his mind stream. Off limits. Can't change it. Only he can change it. But of course, what I've noticed since that conversation, which happened a number of years ago, is that he actually, I notice him around cleaning things. And I notice in myself some attention to maintaining order. Because I know he cares about order, and that's something I can do that's nice for him. And I see him also doing some cleaning, and I imagine it arises out of that same care and affection for me. It has nothing to do with I made him do it. Totally his free choice. And it was also very interesting for me to see, oh, look at that.

[41:02]

Them that likes order and them that likes clean. And we probably need each other. So anyway, that's what I've been thinking about and I thought would be interesting for, maybe interesting, maybe useful for all of you. I wonder if any of you have thoughts or observations or comments or things you want to bring up. Yes? I don't know if I can quite get back to this clearly. It's hard to stay with what kept coming when my mind was stuck. Yeah, it's all right. There's this pith instruction called surprise mind constantly coming up and delighting in the surprises. And of course what happens is that sometimes we're not thrilled with the surprises. So just trust your mind and go with it.

[42:05]

Anyway, I'm not sure I've actually understood clearly what you're saying. It seems that what we're valuing is the calm mind and the is that so, that equanimity without response. And what feels to me like at some point there's a place where that's actually suppressive or not informative and there's a place where getting excited is appropriate and that the is that so can come at any step. And it might be if you want information about, let's say, harming self or others through words or whatever, is that actually you need to get excited and then at some place along there do the step back is that so.

[43:07]

And that you could jump to equanimity. My thought was that you could kind of jump to equanimity too fast and in fact not have a deeper understanding of yourself or others. Well, I agree with part of what you're saying and I have trouble with part of what you're saying. The part about the excitement, if I understand what you mean when you use that word, for me when I get excited I don't see so clearly. The nature of excitement is that I don't see so clearly. But I do think that the point you're making about we can jump to equanimity too quickly is a very, very important point. That we end up doing it kind of as if, oh, I should be a quantumist. By God, I'm going to be a quantumist no matter what. And we don't hang out with where we are in fact

[44:12]

in terms of the eight worldly attitudes. And that we need to be, the point I'm really bringing up, my sort of subtext here is encouraging myself and maybe hoping I'll have some company, to be willing to be present with whatever arises in the mind and to not edit before I know what arises in the mind. Because the more I'm present with whatever arises, the more I really know my mind in some accurate way. And that we tend to do a great deal of editing or judging that is so automatic we don't even realize we're doing it. And so we can talk ourselves into a press release. I am the kind of person who would never do such and such. So if we take Alan's rather difficult example

[45:15]

about child molestation may be enjoyable, which is, I mean, the minute he said that I could almost cut the fear in the room with a knife. Oh my God. And yet, if that is so, for either the person who is perpetrating the molestation or for the person who is experiencing it, what do you do with that thought, that description of your experience? What do you do with that? And in fact, of course, what was so powerful in this situation I've been describing was that there were people present, particularly people who had been molested sexually as children, who were struggling with exactly that point because of all of the shame and dismay they felt at acknowledging to themselves that there was also mixed in with all of this terrible experience some pleasure.

[46:18]

What do I do with that? I mean, as an example of the way we do a kind of editing so we don't come to really know the mind accurately, it's very troublesome. And very often we will have this idea of how we should be and we want to go there before we've gone through all the stuff that is the nature of this particular mind stream this evening. So, for example, kind of code for me is we're all corruptible. That means I'm corruptible. If I have some accurate sense of my own capacity for corruption, maybe I have a chance not to act from that capacity. And yet, if I say, oh me, I wouldn't do that, I wouldn't take that pot from behind the walk-in. Not me, I'm not one of those people.

[47:19]

That immediate kind of response, reaction, keeps me from actually knowing my mind stream accurately. But you could edit, like, Alan Ginsberg could have edited that. I mean, actually lots of people learn things about themselves or others because he didn't edit it, he put it out. That's right, that's right. So, I mean, maybe what's wrong with my pathology too, of course, is that there's a lot that gets edited before you even go out and see what kind of ripple it creates. So then I lose and so does... So at some point there's a place where you... I think, I don't know, where you don't edit and then you see what happens and then you kind of do, oh... When I blow it, I get excited and I start to yell and scream and I get into an argument with somebody or whatever. And particularly if we're in a container where,

[48:23]

let's say you and I get into a big disagreement, an argument about something that really matters to both of us, if we have some agreement to stay together, to stay in the room, to keep coming back and listening and trying to come to a place where we can really understand each other, then in the end what I experienced at Omega will happen. We will begin to see a bigger picture of what is so for both of us. Yes. But I also know that if I don't get excited and I stay present, I may be able to come to that place also, and maybe sooner, and maybe without speaking in a way that has the effect of harm for you. But I can't fake it. If I'm in fact not in that equanimous place, I do harm to myself and maybe to both of us by pretending that I have an equanimous mind when I'm not there yet.

[49:25]

And it's one of the things that makes practicing in a sangha so rich because we work on each other all the time. It's tricky. And, you know, like one of the things in the pith instructions that Alan... It's a wonderful list. He says, If we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything. Well, of course, he writes. He writes in that vein, and then he reads it to everybody. So that night was great. That night Alan gave a poetry reading. There were some people who didn't clap, didn't smile, especially during the first poem, which was a segment from a long poem called Three Loves. Very detailed description of homosexual lovemaking with three particular lovers. And I'm still not convinced it was poetry.

[50:28]

The next day, during another poem, poetry reading, I sat next to a friend of mine who was a Tibetan monk for a long time. Some of you may have heard him when His Holiness the Dalai Lama was here a couple of years ago. He did a kind of meditation flute playing before His Holiness spoke. And he plays this just extraordinary meditation music. And he's himself a quite accomplished practitioner. He's someone I really love dearly. We were sitting next to each other, and he said, What happened with Alan Ginsberg? Of course, he hadn't been there. So we're whispering like this about what happened. I'm telling him what my version of the story was. And then we sit quietly, and then Alan reads his poem. And then, I mean, Alan had read his poems,

[51:30]

and Na Wong said, After the first poem, I was shocked. I didn't like it. Then I remembered I was in America, where you can say anything. And I thought, That's true, you know. I mean, so this rule about, Well, if you don't show it to anybody, you can write anything. We do have this idea that we can just sort of say anything. And we forget that words, but not even just words, thoughts, have consequences, either to another person or to ourselves. And to the degree that we are really interested in the mind and studying the mind, in particular, each of us studying our own mind stream, this point, I think, is really important. And to what degree do I, in my haste to get through the painful material,

[52:35]

getting to know the mind, which isn't thrilling me, because it's not fitting my press release, I want to jump immediately to equanimity. I don't want to be here. I want to go over there, to the way I want to be. And then I put on this sort of masquerade, I have an equanimous mind. There's a quite well-known Tibetan teacher named Geshe Wangyal, who is somewhat contemporary with Suzuki Roshi. And he used to torture his most serious students by accusing them of things he knew that they couldn't possibly have done, as a way of helping them see the true nature of their mind. You could try that, Norman. Well, it's the point that I was trying to raise, and that we're talking about now, it always arises, and I often think about this,

[53:39]

because the whole proposition of practicing the way is that we're studying, contemplating, thinking about, in a way, perfect conduct, what our conduct could be. And then we're stuck with the reality of confusion. And so, then somebody says, well, I don't want to hear about good conduct, because all I do is use it as a big hammer to hit myself over the head, or put myself down for my imperfect conduct, or, on the other hand, to suppress my imperfect conduct by pretending. So, I'm sorry I was late, I had to pick up Aaron, I missed the beginning of your talk. It was wonderful. You missed the best part. I know we talked earlier, you referred to this Keats' idea of capability, and I said that in the beginning, and I think that it really applies here, that somehow, and I think that the somehow is through the practice of meditation.

[54:42]

We get to where the mind can be big enough to hold these two things that seem opposite, in there at the same time. This is really what's going on with me, this is really my effort and my constant motivation and wish, and I see that they're not the same thing, but I keep making the effort to behave in this way, and I keep noticing that I'm behaving in that way, and it's alright for these two things to be there and to co-exist, and I think the gap closes as we go along. Well, I would actually argue that my willingness to be present when I blow it, or when I don't hit the mark, is exactly what allows me to begin to approach that ideal. For example, the language practice that I've done to drop the language that carries habitual judging,

[55:43]

in particular, comparison. This was a practice Bill cooked up, let's not use comparative adjectives or adverbs, a good grammarian practice. Well, that meant for the first three or four days of the practice, I was using comparative adjectives and adverbs, and an hour later or four hours later they were saying, But my willingness to see when I would be using comparative adjectives or adverbs was the critical first step on that path called dropping comparative adjectives and adverbs. And to the degree that I could see that, I could be interested in what I said, and well, how could I have said it differently then? And that process was totally what informed my ability several days later to be quite quiet for a day or two, but to begin then to be aware of comparative adjectives and adverbs

[56:48]

when I'd be thinking, and slowly shifting the words that would come out of my mouth. I think it's a crucial point for us as practitioners. I have a little piece of paper that Suzuki Roshi wrote in 1968, I think. It says, very bold, like a kid had done it with a Sumi brush, Do not say too late. And I found it actually very helpful in terms of the point you're bringing up. If I blew it, am I willing to be present with the blowing out, however that looks, and let that be informing. Hillary, for years, thought that it said, Do not stay too late. Which is also maybe useful. Somebody over here wanted to say something? Yes.

[57:49]

Well, I just wanted to go back to the story about Ali. When he said that perhaps his example was not, skillful means are not appropriate, to wonder if there was actually the content of the example that was not appropriate, because in a way, everything we've been saying is how appropriate it actually was, because he said something so unthinkable, the first thing that we would want to edit out, and how important it is to not edit those most editable things. And that's of course, Alan's life is devoted to saying those things. And your example about the pot and the fishbowl, is one that we can all, even if you had taken that pot, and used it for a fish tank, which I guess we didn't do, we still would probably all love you, but we probably wouldn't love you if you had used some of these other examples. So, I think it seems like it maybe was really skillful,

[58:54]

but do you think that he could have, that the hard part was that he didn't realize what he was saying, or could he have used that example, and presented it in a more confident way? I think so, because in the evidence of his not knowing what he was doing, of his being out of touch with what he was doing, was in his response when the woman yelled at him, which was, say it bigger, come on! And I, because I have known Alan for a long time, and know how kind his heart is, heard that as, I'm willing to hang in here, let's really get into this. She didn't hear it that way. She heard it as a kind of ridiculing her. And when I asked him about that, he said, well, that was in there. That was in there, I was angry. And she said something back, and he then said, oh, keeping company with Jesse Helms.

[59:57]

So he upped the ante. And he, of course, took her screaming at him as the voice of the censor. So, he was caught. Had he not been, had he understood that in this group there were probably as many as a third of the people in the group were incest survivors, he might have used the same example, but he would have been present with it in a different way, I think. Yes, precisely. And it's that part of it that made me later realize, oh, maybe part of what was going on was that he was using someone else's example, an example that he hadn't really considered and thought about, which was, in fact, an extremely valuable and informative example. Now, interestingly, the night before,

[61:00]

and I kept thinking about this during this whole class, Galway Connell had come to do a class in the afternoon and a reading in the evening, and a lot of what he did had to do with naming. Again, a very important part of our practice. He talked about there are those things that are too horrible to say, too horrible or too shameful to speak about, and yet when we speak about them they become less horrible or less shameful. Yes. That connects with the observation that I wanted to make, that it seems that for people who were experiencing anger and upset, and maybe have experienced molestation in their childhood, that a natural tendency, from having had that experience, would be that they would be reluctant to speak up.

[62:01]

And so this all just kind of stayed in the air, and people were feeling the anger and weren't expressing it, and Galway was unaware of what he was causing people to experience, and it just all kind of welled up until that woman finally spoke. But one thing I was not clear on, he said as many as 70 people walked out. Out of 270 left the room. Now did these 70 at some point return to the group and process this whole circle? Or did they... The next morning, not until the next morning, the processing that happened began in smaller groups after the afternoon class. I was concerned that perhaps some of them were so angry that they left and never really... No, no, that was not what happened. But boy, did we work hard there for a day and a half.

[63:04]

It was really intense, and very... I mean, it was a situation in which I learned an enormous amount. And the people who took the longest to be able to settle enough to begin to listen to themselves as much as to anyone else were this small group of people who weren't there. Well... Third-party information, you know. The intensity of our reaction when we have a little distance from something. And how... I watched what happened as this particular small group of people sat in the circle and listened to 30 or 40 people talk about what they heard,

[64:04]

what they saw, what they felt. And there was a kind of, oh... kind of settling or calming that allowed them to begin to see a little bit more widely what they had been hearing about. And to realize that actually it had been quite a complicated situation. And of course, by the time my friend Na Wong got the story from a staff member, it had just changed so it had nothing to do with anything. It was totally the telephone game. You know, there was, like, physical violence. I mean, it was just wild! It was just wild! In a way,

[65:06]

although the very process of writing and the way that we were writing and reading what we were writing to each other got us to a place where we were pretty open with each other. And I think part of what happened was that we shouldn't have had a class on Wednesday afternoon. We should have had the afternoon off. And we had this incredible killer schedule when what Natalie and I had originally designed was a week with a lot of open space for naps and daydreaming and wandering around. And instead we had all these stars coming in and we were all kind of going, not one more poet coming to teach us about writing. So part of it was, you know, it was a lot like the third day of a sashim. It was like all hell was ready to break loose and that's what happens on the third day. I mean, there was going to be all hell breaking loose of one sort if not another. I mean, that's my particular theory.

[66:09]

Sharon Olds was the most with our process of practice and was there. She, in the evening when she did her reading, she said, I would prefer that we not tape this reading because then I can read things that are still in process. And what she did was she joined us in writing practice in a way that was very, very powerful. And she, as Natalie would put it, goes for the jugular. So there was a way her presence as a working writer was a real gift. I was very, very moved by the way she was in the context. And she completely understood what we were doing together and was just fitted in in a way that was quite seamless. It was great. I admire her work a great deal. But her, the way she was was so consistent with the feeling you get, the experience

[67:13]

that comes from reading her work. I actually had this thought, something I hope maybe you might think about, Norman. I had this sense of how much, particularly of this group of people listening to poets talk about their poetry and talking about writing and how completely relevant it was for Dharma practice. So powerfully so. It was wonderful. Anyway, of everybody that came as a so-called star, she was the one who was really there. Interestingly, Alan is kind of Natalie's teacher for writing practice. And the teaching he did on this particular class was just brilliant. I'm getting tapes of the whole thing. So if any of you in particular

[68:13]

are interested to hear the tape, find out for yourselves directly what really happened. It's an extraordinary teaching that he did. Unedited. And in the evening, he did a rendering of the Heart Sutra with his harmonium that was just fabulous. Really fabulous. It was the most lively Heart Sutra I've heard in a long time. Wendy? I wanted to go back to what you said, how dear you are to your wife. I remember when that suggestion came up. And I remember thinking that's a way for us to ignore what's happening right now. To sit and face the wall and not talk together. Now I have a very different feeling about what you suggested. And it has something to do with being willing to see how we can change by doing nothing. By so-called doing nothing.

[69:14]

And also during the bodyhood talk tonight, many times the image came up to me of a soft mind. And also the word truth and consequence. You know, there's this expression truth or consequence. To me, consequential truth, they seem to go together now. Consequential truth seems to go together. In that willingness to be truthful and to deal with the consequences that come up from telling the truth and to stay together, you can see some evolution. And I feel like I have a different sense about the idea of practicing the Middle Way. For years I thought Middle Way was an averaging between what Sonja was talking about, excitements and dullness, or turning away from the world more than anything else, or turning towards the world. Now I see it as a very narrow consequential place where we can really be truthful together. So the idea of sitting together in difficult times,

[70:18]

and I feel like our Sangha is in a difficult time right now, the thought of actually sitting down together and feeling what we feel. I'm thinking about Jack Horsfield's Dharma Talks, the feeling of feeling. And really being willing to do that together is radical truth. Really radical truth. A lot of that is coming up. There's one more thing I want to say. When Jesse was born and also when Elisa was born, I was plagued by very strong feelings of violence and fear. First of all, the wholesome stuff, maybe fear for my children making me hurt. But then, very bizarre stuff of me hurting my children started to come up in my mind. And I noticed how much I wanted to censor those kinds of thoughts. Until I got with a group of other parents, and I found that they were coming up for other

[71:19]

parents too, and it gave me a different sense of potential and transformation. Being willing to look at that. Yeah. And see, what I've noticed in watching the way, when I get excited, or the way I respond in a situation where, what do you mean? How quickly I'd rather rivet on what's going on with the other person, because to be really present with what's going on in my own mind, it's like everything in me wants to just let's get out of here. You know, let's distract ourselves by riveting on somebody else. And particularly to the degree that there's some habitual judgment going on, we end up beating on ourselves in a way that means we can't be present. We aren't present. This is where the beloved practice

[72:22]

about bare noting is our great friend. And if I get rigid in my thinking, then I assume that everybody else is also. That's a mysterious thing you've done now. You can't see people changing, especially change or take over. Yeah. Yeah. So, I love this pith instruction of Alan's. Notice what you notice. Isn't that great? Observe what's vivid. We had a wonderful discussion about first thought, best thought. Somebody said, but what if my first thought is I want to kill that person? Maybe my second thought is my best thought. So, I think he's talking about a very particular kind of first thought. Well, that's a whole other talk.

[73:40]

This grew out of my interest in the language that I tend, that I think we all tend to use, that carries that judgment which is habitual and consequently not conscious or that we don't notice. And seeing that the particular category of habitual judgment, which we would call comparison, is especially troublesome. This really grew out of my remembering Suzuki Roshi. One of the few things I remember him saying, just don't do it, was don't compare. And what I was doing was paying attention to the language I use and nudging myself in the direction of speaking in particular and descriptively rather than using comparisons.

[74:43]

Because what I observed was that when I would speak in particular and in a descriptive way that was a language it was a way of focusing on language which doesn't carry habitual judgment, which is what I was working with. I find working with language practices in this way a way of mind training that has fairly quick success. And given that Zen in general is sort of the slow path, it's nice to occasionally have some quick success. It helps one stay with what is slower to change. So I find language practices very interesting and also fun. They're fun to do. I have a pretty good swim buddy who likes to do them with me, so that

[75:48]

helps also, I think. So anyway, that particular practice was focusing on a very particular category of judging language which I was interested in not only paying attention to, but dropping, if I could. Replacing it with more description. We can talk about it some more sometime if you want to. So thank you all very much. Pre-intention

[76:25]

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