This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. So this is, wow, what a sound. This is case, I think it's 29 of the Blue Cliff Record. Okay, so when the Kalpa fire comes and destroys the entire world system, is this one destroyed or not?

[01:01]

Daswee says, destroyed. And then he says, okay, fine. So does it go along with it? And Daswee says, it goes along. Which sounds pretty, you know, I don't know, final or something. But anyway... So, in the widest possible view, life is, depending on how you look at it, either just inextricably entangled with memory, or else actually just is memory. Right? And I tend to fall on the side of the life is memory proposition.

[02:11]

So if you look back, there's a whole bunch of theories about the origin of life, but my favorite one is there's this sort of evolutionary biologist by the name of Nick Lane who wrote a book called The Vital Question. I don't know if anybody's ever read it. It's a very good book. But he makes the claim that life arose in serpentinizing deep ocean vents, right? And the idea is that, you know, there are these vents that make this sort of rock sponge, right? And in these little tiny chambers in this rock sponge, it was possible to have enough kind of simultaneous stability and flow of chemicals of various sorts to establish the chemistry of life. And when you look at the chemistry of life, his claim is that that

[03:18]

primary memory mechanism is remembered in part because of with using these minerals that kind of have the signature of serpentinizing deep ocean vents, which is kind of an amazing proposition, right? So we have pieces of ancient open ocean crust like floating around in our body chemistry, right? And The other good part about that is that the relics of serpentinizing deep ocean vents are just planted all over Mount Tamalpia. So you can go up and walk up on Mount Tam and see a big pile of green rock. The interesting thing about serpentine is that hardly anything can grow in a serpentine outcrop, right? So there are these bare spots that were this wild-looking green rock, and you're like, origin of life. Nice. Probably didn't happen in the ones that are on Mount Tam.

[04:23]

It happened, you know, ages ago. But anyway, so from that point, like, the process continued, right? And, you know, life remembered how to live and then... got more complicated and started burning more energy and um and got more and got more multi-layered and multi-cellular and you know and then after a while there was us and it's been about i think something like one third or so of the entire life of the universe as far as we know that that's been going on here on this planet, which is kind of remarkable, right? That's a long time. Nobody really knows, has a clear idea at all about when, you know, mind arose, right?

[05:37]

And Up until quite recently, in this kind of modern Western culture, Euro-American culture or something like that, the assumption was that only humans had one. And if you were religious, it was humans and... some other spirit beings, gods, demons, angels, and so on and so forth, and everybody else didn't have one, right? But by now it seems pretty inescapable, the evidence seems pretty undeniable that a huge variety of animals have, non-human animals, have mechanisms that are similar to, or exactly like ours, mental mechanisms, and also even the ones that aren't particularly similar, like there's a bunch of fish that are extremely smart, right?

[06:56]

They nonetheless seem to display a kind of self-awareness and sentience, right? Remarkable. And so we're, you know, that should give us all pause, right? But we have no idea what their mind is like, but the way we experience it sort of conventionally, let's put it that way, it's kind of like the frosting on this incredibly deep layer cake of memory-based life mechanisms that go all the way down to the subcellular level with things like mitochondria, right? And the... the frosting part, the part that we're usually mostly aware of and conscious of, has a number of qualities.

[08:11]

One is that it's really, really tangled up with language. I've probably told everyone in this room this story, but I'll tell it again anyway. Like when my daughter Deirdre, who's now, I guess, 34 and a college professor in Pittsburgh, was about two, we were talking on the phone and she said, you know, Dad, I just discovered today that I can talk to myself without talking out loud. And I was like, yeah. And then I was also like, oh. Because, you know, that's essentially how it starts, right? You discover that you can tell the story of your life, right?

[09:18]

And... to yourself and that that story comes with, over time, that story gets more elaborate and also we learn the sort of emotional constructs that go along with it that underscore our self-narrative thoughts. In fact, that underscore pretty much every thought I'll digress a little bit. There's a book called Descartes' Error that's essentially about this, and it has a case study, it references a case study where there's this guy, a neuroscientist, who was working with a man who was was a working lawyer, but during the course of his adult life, he'd had some disease that had kind of wrecked his ability to attach emotional weights to thoughts, basically.

[10:29]

So there's very little emotional drive in his sort of everyday cognitive activity. And he would... the neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists would do these experiments where he'd say, okay, you need to sign this document here. And he'd pluck down three pens on the table, right? And the guy would sit there like... Because he couldn't generate a sufficiently strong preference to pick up one pen over another. I mean, so it really is a big deal, right? The emotional drivers of our everyday thinking, right? And also that sort of everyday conventional cognitive mind, right?

[11:35]

that we carry around with us, and that a lot of people think is the only way there is to be. The book, Descartes' Error, is named Descartes' Error because, well, for a number of reasons, but one of the things he critiques is the whole notion of, I think, therefore I am. That's not exactly right. And in fact, it's a common mistake. that mind is... Well, let me say one additional thing there. Obviously, this, you know, sort of philosophical stance about the nature of mind has a name, and it's usually called physicalism, right?

[12:36]

The idea that that mind is embedded in body, right? The critiques of physicalism almost always make this error in their argument, which is that that to accuse the physicalists of saying that mind is the same as body. That's not true. It's like the body is a physical machine and substrate and mind is an emergent process that has completely different characteristics and is in many ways like auto-catalyzing

[13:36]

obviously with help from the underlying substrate, but it has its own thing. It's a different thing. If it's a physical, if the name of the philosophical stance is physicalism, then this is the metaphysics of physicalism. It's metaphysical. And even more interesting, that mind is constructed, because it's so richly entangled with language, it's constructed entirely out of things that people have said to each other, right? And said to me, right? The mind is made out of things that people have said to me. That's how I learned the language that I self-marrate with, right? And that's how I learned the... that's how I learned the emotional constructs that go along with it, right?

[14:40]

By observation and listening. Um, and so that, that, the, the metaphysics of, you know, physicalism has to include the fact that it's actually kind of, mind is actually kind of a shared field of mental activity, right? It's a, and it, and it, mental activity, speech, and observation, and it goes back into the depths of time. It's almost the same as ancient twisted karma. In fact, it's a component of ancient twisted karma. It's the whole Kalbafire thing. In South Asia, you know, pre-Muddhism, like in, I think, the Vedas and the Upanishads, certainly in the Upanishads, there's this, there's this scheme for describing the universe, the timescales in the universe, right?

[16:03]

The idea is there are these incredibly long periods called kaphas. They're estimated, or when people do all the math on them, they're a little over four billion years long. And they're each divided up into a number of periods, sub-periods, that are called yugas. And I forget the names of all the rest of them, and for reasons that will become obvious in a second, but the last yuga in each kalpa is called Kali Yuga, and Kali Yuga is named after the sort of goddess of destruction, right? And it's the really bad one. It's also the shortest, but it's also the worst, right? Like... things go really badly, everyone's awful to each other, et cetera, et cetera.

[17:04]

And then the whole world comes apart, and this massive fire comes up, and it burns everything. And the name of that event is the pralaya, right? So when the monk was asking Dasui about what happens, he's talking about the pralaya. And the... the notion that was in place at the time of the Buddha, and as far as I know is still in place, is that we're really kind of getting near the end of the present Kali Yuga, and that, you know, the end is near, basically, and the fire is going to show up kind of soon, right? Yeah. I don't want to talk too much. But I'm already doing it, so sorry.

[18:06]

It's not totally clear to me that Daswi and the monk really believed this in this system, right? It sounds to me like they're mostly just using it as a way of talking about the nature of life, mind, and consciousness, right? but even if they were, we can do that, right? And what's fascinating about their exchange, right, is that it's, you know, Dasui takes a very kind of straightforward view of the of the nature of, you know, I've sort of already said this, of the nature of mind and body, consciousness and body.

[19:10]

And he's basically saying, like Suzuki Roshi says, that they're not one and not two, right? They're interdependent, they're connected, they're deeply entangled and inextricable. So the pralaya, also well before Buddhism, was used as a metaphor for states of mind that were available usually through meditative practice or yogic practice in which the activity of conventional cognition would cease or settle or recede into the background, leaving a broader field, basically.

[20:21]

And in the context of that broader field, other things can happen, right? So that includes what people usually talk about as enlightenment, right? And it's probably the case that Dassault and the monk were also talking about that. So how does that work? I just remembered I was going to read you a poem and I forgot the piece of paper or something, so I apologize for that.

[21:23]

All I had to do was bring this and a piece of paper. If we, in the context at least of Zazen and elsewhere as well, it's the case that over time this other mode of engagement comes into view. It does it on its own time and in its own way. It's not always the same experience and sometimes it's really obvious and riveting and sometimes it's subtle. But in any case, it comes into view and we can practice with that. And in the context of that practice, one of the things that becomes

[22:40]

tremendously clear, right, is that this activity that we've been talking about, the activity of bringing perceptions, you know, up from our essentially sensory hardware, contact between our sensory hardware and the world of form, right, and measuring their valence and then allowing the ones with the powerful valence to arise to the level of perception, which is, again, the reason for that is that those perceptions, in the light of awareness, are input to our storehouse consciousness and outcomes stuff, mental activity. that's critical to everything about what it is to be human.

[23:50]

And so some of the things that it is to be human that that's critical to are marvelous. We have this capacity to, well, write poetry, for example, even though We have this capacity to forget to bring it. We have a capacity to make elaborate, long-range plans and cooperate smoothly with people to implement them. And it makes, among other things, smartphones and green tea ice cream. Wonderful. And then the other fact is that it's at the core of our self-delusion and suffering, right?

[25:02]

Because, again, our memory is great, but it completely reflects... only our own very narrow path through the world and the things that people had to say to us along that path, right? That's it. That's what we've got. And then after a while, we can read some stuff too, right? Maybe some Buddhist literature or something, right? But that's what we've got. We have this really limited view, and our capacity to understand is... is dwarfed by the whole universe of things that we can't know and can't understand. How could we not delude ourselves? And so this activity of laying down memory traces and picking them up

[26:13]

and acting on them based on their emotional drivers is something to be careful and discerning with, right? And the, you know, I think most people will tell you that those things happen automatically. It's like, you know, they just said this thing and I got mad and I hit him. That particular mechanism wants to be free to operate without intervention, right? And it sort of operates in this sort of to semi-conscious realm.

[27:15]

And so it's hard to look at, right? Hard to watch. But with, in the presence of big mind, it becomes quite visible, actually. You can really see how it's working. Usually our periods of being able to do that are limited by this cycle of attention we have where normally our attention is being pulled from broader awareness to pretty focused awareness on the process of cognition and then, you know, opening back up again to pay attention to the world, right? But over time, it becomes more possible to hold everyday mind in the context of a big mind, right? And when that happens, it's possible to soften the emotional drivers of our habit, energy, and habitual response.

[28:17]

It becomes possible to see other possibilities. It becomes possible to move deliberately and see the spaces in between recognizing, responding, and acting. So the last thing I wanted to say is this. There's this phrase that shows up all over the Zen literature, the idea of leaving no trace, right? And I would say that based on what I've been talking about for the last little while, it's impossible to leave no trace. What we do in life is we leave traces in our minds and we leave traces in the minds of others.

[29:22]

That's what we do, right? But leaving no trace is kind of a nod to the the Taoist notion of wu-wei, right? Non-doing. Non-doing doesn't mean not doing anything. It means doing things in such a way that the activity is so wholehearted and untainted by self-regard that Even though you're sitting there working your ass off, nobody, including you, even knows it, basically. That's kind of not doing. And that's leaving no trace. That's kind of the best we can do. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[30:30]

Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[30:50]

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