How nice to see the kids. As I was walking into Cloud Hall and coming into the Zendo, we came upon a barn swallow glistening with its marvelous iridescent blue-black wings and luminous brown chest. And of course the swallows are busy raising their young, just the way your mothers and fathers are busy raising you. And actually, what happens between us and our children, and the children of the world who are not ours but are ours, is very much in my mind this morning. We have a chance with the children in the world to choose to not pass along more of

[01:20]

our suffering than we can't help. It's a great challenge and wonderful opportunity. As many of you know, the Buddha is often quoted as saying, I teach one thing and one thing only, suffering and the end of suffering, which is what I want to talk about this morning. But what I want to say to all of you children before you go outside for the rest of your morning together is to help your parents and the other adults in your lives help you be as awake as you can be. And most of you know a lot about how to do that because it comes with being young and not spoiled by the world. So trust and respect your experience and be as kind as you can to each other and to your

[02:31]

parents and the other adults in your lives. The more you practice those qualities of kindness and being as present as you can when you're young, those qualities may last as you get older. And I don't think you'll regret it. So what I'd like you to do is to go out in the garden or wherever you're going to be and keep your eyes open for all the creatures, birds and plants and insects in particular, who are just starting their lives. So you get to see how much company you have with being in the beginning stages of your lives. This is the time of year when coming into life is almost hysterical and it's happening.

[03:31]

Great. So have a nice morning and go see what you can find out there. Baby bugs, baby birds, baby flowers. The seriousness of the young, it's great. Have a nice morning. Bye bye. Thanks for being here. Hi. Hi.

[04:39]

I teach one thing and one thing only, suffering and the end of suffering. I, of course, forgot that this was the first Sunday of the month and that the kids would be here. And my theme for the morning isn't exactly a kid's theme. So that was an instance of winging it. Except that I've just spent several days with my husband's new grandchild. And so I was being honest when I said that this whole business of children and what we pass on to them, knowingly and unknowingly, is very much in my mind. So in a way, what I want to talk about this morning has to do with ignorance.

[05:57]

The translation for ignorance that I find especially helpful these days is unconscious misknowing. Because, of course, it is what we don't know, what we are not aware of, that is especially troublesome. It is especially the ground from which our suffering arises. I guess to begin, I want to ask each of you to spend a moment thinking about what was your motivation in coming here to Green Gulch this morning. And there may be a mixture of motivations. A beautiful spring day. No fog.

[07:00]

Wouldn't it be nice to go out to the coast and see the garden and have a nice morning? Happiness. I'd like to have a happy morning. Maybe a little wisdom mixed into it if I'm lucky. Or maybe not. But let me warn you, if I may. The Buddhist path, the curriculum, if you will, of meditation practice, which can be thought of as a path for training the mind, is not easy. And can be very challenging. The process of waking up, of coming to see clearly what is so, will inevitably bring

[08:05]

about a kind of dislodging of what is familiar, of what we hang on to because it's familiar and known, of course with the promise of liberation from suffering. But that path is challenging. And not for everybody. So the first thing I want to consider with you is what is the difference between a trained mind and an untrained mind? The very process of waking up to that difference is itself a very important and challenging process. Because, of course, what happens is that we'll notice later a moment when we were not in attention,

[09:09]

when we were out of attention or asleep. If we're lucky. And if we are patient, the noticing will happen closer and closer to the moment. But that will depend on how open we are to seeing after the fact what we see, even when we're not thrilled with what we see. Especially about our own behavior or our own thoughts or our own motivation. Right now I'm working with someone who has an enormous amount of self-criticism, self-judgment and the accompanying thoughts of doom and misery and failure. Lots of comparing mind.

[10:10]

And it has taken this person quite a long time to begin to see those thoughts that carry all of that patterning as pattern, rather than as a series of individual thoughts which she keeps believing. And, of course, every time she believes any of those thoughts, there is a great sinking physically, emotionally, energetically. And what arises is great anxiety and fear. And I'm struck by how long it has taken this person who has for some time had a real intention to do something about her suffering. Just the difference between seeing the thoughts as instances of a pattern of thinking

[11:15]

over against the individual thoughts. She's been using a practice which I treasure for a while and which I've talked about here before, the practice of bare noting. That is, noticing hardly at all. Bare in that way. Where you notice a particular thought and, if possible, the kind of thought. So, not just thinking, but to notice, oh, judgment. Oh, comparison. Whatever. And to then, as quickly as possible, shift attention to some neutral body sensation. The bottoms of the feet. The sensation in your hand as it rests on your leg. Your butt on the chair. Whatever.

[12:16]

As long as the sensation is not significantly pleasant or unpleasant. And then to the breath. Oh, but if I don't stay with this thought, I might miss some important insight. This is a thought I should stay with and consider. Kiss of death. Because then we sink into the content of the thought and drop into thinking informed by that thought of judgment or comparison or what is sometimes called self-loathing. Which, interestingly, we in this culture and time seem to have a significantly strong tendency for. Buddhist teachers who come to the United States from other cultures comment on how often they find in Americans a very negative inner relationship with oneself.

[13:19]

So, one of the first challenges is to consider that you might not believe everything you think. I think we need a bumper sticker. Don't believe everything you think. And that does not mean don't believe anything you think. I'm not saying that. I'm proposing that some thoughts are reliable and many thoughts are not. And because our cultural conditioning, our social conditioning is so much with thinking, so much in the thinking mind, we can often find ourselves quite disconnected from the physical body which is vastly more reliable, as is the breath, than thoughts and thinking. So this practice of bare noting is allowing us

[14:28]

to begin to change our point of reference from thinking to body sensation and breath. That in itself can in time be quite useful from the standpoint of what is reliable as a point of reference. But in this particular practice, the main factor in the shift from the thinking or thought to body sensation and breath is that those two points of reference are the quickest and easiest way to come into the present moment. So that you're not caught in the past or the future that is what the thoughts are about. And I imagine if you think for a moment, you may find in your own experience that that characteristic about thinking is what fits with your own experience.

[15:29]

So a few days ago, this person that I'm telling you about had a particularly unhappy night. Her neighbor who comes home at one or two or three in the morning and wears his shoes to the bathroom through the kitchen which is right over this person's bedroom and goes in and pees and then drops the lid and then walks back through the kitchen to the front of the house to take his shoes off. And of course, once my friend awakens, she has a very hard time going back to sleep and that can be the point in the night when the cascade of negative thinking begins. Now, this person has been working with bare noting for a little while,

[16:34]

intermittently and then more and more, but during waking hours. So this particular night, she was completely sunk in the thoughts and the consequences of the thoughts. But in the morning when she fully woke up, she realized, oh, they are part of a pattern. And she had in that moment of recognition stepped back a little bit to the point of being able to see pattern and not be caught in quite the same way with the content of the thoughts. And what has arisen to a quite striking degree is a clarity on this person's part about what her work is. To wake up to these thoughts as pattern,

[17:36]

to understand this kind of patterning, mental reactive patterning and the accompanying reactive emotional patterning, with the possibility that those patterns can in time with increasing attention be taken apart and in time perhaps fade, but certainly that she can change her relationship to those thoughts in simply not letting them be in the driver's seat, if you will. So here is an example of someone who has some glimmer of the territory in the mind which is untrained and which is by its very nature an expression of what we sometimes call our conditioning. But of course for many of us

[18:45]

we aren't aware of our conditioning and in many cases we are actually not aware of our suffering. And if we don't know our suffering we are going to have a very hard time having some access to our capacity which we all have for changing our suffering. The Buddha in his teachings and in fact the teachings that come out of the historical Buddhist teachings don't say that we aren't going to have pain. Suffering refers to the different kinds of suffering that arise from the way we react to pain, physical and emotional and psychological pain. The pain that arises from physical and mental and emotional pain

[19:46]

is one kind of suffering. The pain that arises from the fact of change, of impermanence, which is big for all of us one way or another if for nothing else than the very impermanence of the body for ourselves and or for those we love. And the third kind of suffering has much more to do with what we might call kind of existential pain that comes up around who am I? Where am I in the world? Where do I fit into the scheme of things? All that stuff. There are many people who have a sense of suffering,

[20:51]

their own suffering and the suffering of those around them, but they look for the causes of the suffering outside of themselves. If I just have the right environment, my baby won't cry or be fussy or my husband won't cry. He won't be mad at me or things will go well at work if I just have a different boss. And in the Buddhist meditation tradition, the focus is very much on what arises in each of our mind streams. How much of our suffering arises out of our reaction to the stuff of our lives? The difference, for example, when you're on the freeway, which is of course these days become the great occasion for spiritual cultivation.

[21:52]

I'm very serious. And one day somebody cuts in front of you and you just go ballistic, scream and yell and pound your steering wheel and honk the horn and give him the finger and call him a name and blah, blah, blah, you know, just furious. And on another day it's like, gosh, that person must be in a hurry. What's the difference? It's not out there, it's in the mind. And there's a great reluctance in many of us to recognize how much of our suffering we actually can do something about. Right now I'm teaching a class in Berkeley and we are working with anger, a hot topic from several points of view.

[22:56]

And this perspective that the causes and conditions for anger arising are within me is a kind of pointing out which a number of people don't like. No, that's not true. She made me angry. We have this way of speaking and of thinking. And we cloud in that way of speaking and that way of thinking, we cloud the fact that what's really critical is what is my state of mind on any given day or any given moment. And that I can first get to know my untrained mind and then begin to cultivate my capacity for training the mind. And of course it is the meditation path

[24:03]

which is the crucial pathway for this training of the mind. But I want to reiterate that the shift from being asleep, from not seeing clearly, to beginning to wake up can feel from the inside like a very mixed review. Because of course what we're doing is upsetting our familiar apple cart, if you will. We're posing the possibility of looking at whatever arises from the perspective of how much do I know about my own conditioning? How much do I know about the reactive patterns, mental and emotional, in my own life? How open am I to seeing clearly my own limitations,

[25:08]

my own ignorance, and the behavior that follows from ignorance and reactivity? There can be such sorrow and fear in beginning to look at ourselves in this way. So one of the reasons for having good company and having some guidance is because that's what will help us stay with the process long enough to discover for ourselves, am I willing to go this way? To be around other people who have been on this path for a longer period of time and to begin to see what the fruit of the Buddhist path looks like can make a big difference. The source of inspiration really comes from

[26:15]

being around people who've been cooked in this cauldron called the meditation path for a while. A colleague of mine often talks about, you know, are you willing to die? He says it so cheerfully. But of course we do experience a kind of oh my goodness, I feel like I'm dying when we run up against what is familiar and we begin to see the negative consequences of that patterning and then we're left with well then what I move toward, I don't know. What is it? So what arises often is an interesting kind of tangle

[27:19]

of hesitancy, fear, denial, relief. My own experience is that the more I can see clearly my own limitations without judgment, without harshness, but just seeing and in time understanding is directly connected to my ability to see in a kindly way the limitations of others. And it is out of this process that the ground, if you will, of compassion arises. And of course what's so interesting to me is that with all of our limitations,

[28:19]

with all of the limitations we see manifest in the world we live in these days, if people are willing to see clearly and stay open to oneself and to others, we discover possibilities that we couldn't see from the outside of the moment. Or the situation. Unconscious misknowing. Such an interesting way of talking about what's called ignorance. So the path is really setting up a kind of double bind, if you will, about noticing when I'm unconscious. How do I do that? How do I be awake to when I'm asleep? Not so easy. My suggestion is that you be willing to notice

[29:26]

when you were asleep sometime in the past and that you not feed the thoughts about, oh, too late. Oh, I wish I'd seen that sooner. Oh, if I'd only been awake then. That's all about the reaction of judgment and kind of fear-based thoughts. I have a little piece of paper hanging on the wall of our meditation room where I practice down the road. In Suzuki Roshi's hand says, do not say too late. And on the other side is a statement from William Shawn who was the editor of The New Yorker for 30 years, who when John McPhee was a young writer said to him,

[30:30]

how can you take all this time editing and working with me on this article I'm writing about how basketball floors are made when you're supposed to get this magazine out once a week? How can you do that? And Mr. Shawn said, it takes as long as it takes, pulled his pencil out and worked on the article. I saw that immediately when I read it as a kind of Dharma pointing out that is a good accompaniment with Suzuki Roshi's statement. It's of course a statement about patience. And with Suzuki Roshi, what he's pointing out, I believe, is to respect what we see when we see it. To not judge or criticize as too late some insight, but to respect that insight.

[31:31]

And if we do that, my experience for myself and with people I practice with is that the gap between the moment of the action and the moment of insight begins to close. Perhaps not so quickly, not as quickly as I wish, but does begin to close. My resistance to seeing when I'm asleep begins to shift and open up, but not so quickly. Often in the beginning stages of meditation practice, these kinds of insights about something that happened an hour ago or a year ago or twenty years ago kind of goes bloop. In that great spaciousness of taking our seat in meditation,

[32:38]

where the physical body is aligned and centered, where we have great stability and openness with our attention resting on the breath, certain kinds of insights can begin to emerge because there's a container in which whatever is ready to arise will begin to. If I keep bringing my attention to physical posture and breath, where breath in time becomes the primary focus of attention, I'm not then at the same time feeding my reactive patterns. Resting in the breath is a way to have a more expanded quality of mind

[33:39]

within which some insights about the nature of my untrained mind begin to arise. This great vehicle, if you will, for waking up is just that. Some of us have the tendency to go after our asleepness or our reactivity with a big flashlight, you know, those big industrial strength flashlights with barrels that are this long and weigh, I don't know, too many pounds and a huge stick, and we go after some aspect of the mind with that kind of, I'm going to find this enemy and beat it to death or whatever. But that's, of course, the mind that is characterized by constriction.

[34:41]

And the more constricted the mind, the narrower the seeing, what we sometimes would call tunnel vision. And the Buddhist meditation path is very much about the spaciousness of the mind, the opening of our capacity for attention, not the constricting of it. So another way of talking about suffering is to talk about suffering in terms of reactive patterns. Reactive mental patterns, reactive emotional patterns, linked together so intimately that they arise as though one thing, a thought and emotions accompanied by body sensation like that.

[35:48]

So part of the path is slowing our pace down, allowing ourselves periods of time, ideally every day, when we can quiet the body, stop talking, stop reading, and allow the kind of settling and quiet that increases this spacious seeing. I was recently involved in a meeting that included a group of people involved in the arts world. And about two-thirds of the group have some experience with Buddhist meditation and about one-third don't. So we did a little bit of meditation during our gathering and, of course, that included being silent. One person in the meeting who's an artist said afterwards,

[36:54]

nobody's going to tell me when to be silent. Which is, of course, true. It does need to be voluntary. Sorry. But I would invite you to voluntarily sit down and be still. Turn off the background music. Turn off the TV. Perhaps sit down early enough in the day so that the world will not come knocking and banging on the door to interrupt you. And let yourself taste the kind of quiet that comes from sitting down, arranging the body so that the upper torso has these qualities of being centered and aligned and grounded.

[37:57]

And bring your attention to the breath. And find out for yourself what your own capacity is for being open to, whenever it's possible, seeing what you do not want to see. Seeing what you are afraid to see. Seeing what your mother forbade you to see. Or your father. Or your grandmother. Or your kindergarten teacher. Or whoever. And, of course, what is most tangled and difficult to see is the sleepiness, the patterns of sleepiness that are some generations old.

[39:02]

And so come to us with remarkable amounts of energy. I remember some years ago, as I was really beginning to have a sense of my own conditioning, particularly from my family of origin, I remember waking up one morning in that kind of transitional stage when you're not quite awake but you're not asleep and having this really felt sense, more than a picture, that I was in a very small rowboat trying to turn the Queen Mary. And what I didn't realize at the time was that the image was very accurate. And some years later I realized that the image had changed for me,

[40:04]

that I could turn the Queen Mary if I worked with the tides as they changed. And got a few other tugboats to help. And was patient. There would be that nanosecond opportunity to push with the oar a little bit and have more consequence than I could imagine. We here in this part of the United States live in a local culture, if you will, that I think of as being particularly true on the West Coast. Some openness to some sophistication in psychological and emotional terms and some culture of willingness to try things that are unfamiliar. So let's use that context and surround as one of the factors in helping us wake up.

[41:17]

If, of course, you're interested in waking up. That's a decision that no one can make for us. It's the decision that only each of us can make. No one else can make for ourselves. To discover our capacity to respect ourselves and to develop confidence that rests not on misinformation or unconscious misknowing, but that rests on what arises from being present in each moment. Very close, and yet seems so far away. And please enjoy the morning here at Grignoche.

[42:21]

Don't feel badly if you judge your motivation in coming here as too self-serving or whatever, but just let the motivation be reconsidered and expanded. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a nice morning, especially on such a beautiful June day. No wind. That's a treasure, isn't it? I find my heart aches with these winds, because, of course, this is our experience of the fact of global warming. This is what happens. With heat comes wind. Part of our unconscious misknowing is what we are doing collectively, not just individually.

[43:30]

So we're getting more and more help from the world we live in about waking up, and my wish is that we wake up sooner than later, if we can, and that we engage in the process of waking up with enormous amounts of kindness and tenderness with ourselves and with each other. Thank you very much.

[44:01]

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