The talk was to have been in answer to Kwan's question after a talk given six months ago. Why can't you be happy? And I wonder that, too. And so I started out to examine the situation and remembered that Harry Roberts, a wonderful cowboy, Gold digger, bootlegger, marvel with plants who helped us out at Green Gulch. I heard him say to some students once, if you want to be happy now, go back to a time when you were happy, throw everything else out and start from there. So I thought I would do that. Well, I'm more than I bargained for. Because in the middle of my research is we got the news that a former student and friend of ours, maybe some people now here still remember.

[01:10]

I can't even remember his name. Ron Blustein. Anybody? One, two, three, four. He came to us in almost an extremist. He was probably as far down and out in all the categories of life that you could ask for. And bit by bit, he smoothed out a little and he was pretty clever. He conned us a number of times, but he had a way about him that was engaging. And he also was a famous catch. You know, the English word catch a complainer, a skilled complainer who knew just how to put it in there and to hear him go through it. It was a magnificent act. But he called on the phone the other day.

[02:14]

He's on his way into a place across the street. Hostess down in Philadelphia. He's riddled with cancer, has three growths in his brain and had decided not to have an operation. The voice Blanche and I both talked with him. The voice that I heard was not the voice of the man that I remembered. I don't know when I have been as. Pleased by talking with someone as I was with Ron. He was right there. He was talking right on. But there was a dimension there that I had not known before. I'd never been that close to somebody who had that. And that concerned me personally.

[03:23]

I did not respond to him in earlier days. So when I threw away my old talk and saw what was left on my desk, I found a letter from him. Let's see, from November, just about the time I was thinking about writing my talk. And I want to read a little bit of it because I haven't got my own to talk with. My sister has urged me to put all my affairs in order and I am now getting my journals together for the 20th century. It's only because of their length and continuity. I've read a little bit of each of them and have arranged them over the years. He spiral notebooks from the years 1968 to the present. I don't know if any of you journal.

[04:29]

But I used to. And the idea that he had done that just blew me away. And he mentions me in a very strange way. I can find it here. Oh. Do you recall the instant in work circle where you suffered? From panic attacks. Who wrote that panic is the only approved response to the gravity of life and the eternity of annihilation. Nothing. I know what that was. Blanche and I had gone out with to do take Ed Brown's place at a talk up in the mountains, the mountains, the hills of Marin.

[05:29]

And I didn't want to go to the talk. So she went on and said, why don't you get out and look around and see where you are? And she showed me a map and I got out and the car and I looked at the map. And then I went up to the next highest elevation so I could look out over the whole Bay Area. And lo and behold, Mount Tamalpais had moved. No kidding. Freak me out. I had expected to see it here and it was there. And fortunately I didn't lose it. I got back to the car and freaked out all the way home as each new light came at me. And another time we were shun piking in Connecticut where the roads go back to the Indian trail days and just deliberately stayed off the main road and wandered around. And then Blanche looked at the clock and said, we better get back. Your sister will wonder about us. I'll stop in here and phone this before cell phones.

[06:32]

And you find the shortest way home and handed me the map, she says. And we are right here. I turned the map over. I couldn't find where I was. And I panicked again. panicked in the face of his experience, evidently got to me in a way that I'm only now beginning to understand as I'm speaking. His acceptance of his condition, I think, is called technically revolutionary acceptance. Radical exception, except shouldn't.

[07:35]

Right. Acceptance. Right. Right. Whoa. OK. Do you hear what they said? Any of you others want to join in and give me words that I can't come up with now? I'd be really appreciative of it. Then that concept. must have worked on me in a way that was totally unusual because I had come across that concept in an explanation by a Christian practitioner of how he understood Jesus last experience on the cross. In Matthew and Mark, it ends with my God, my God, why has thou deserted me?

[08:40]

And in Luke, who was a doctor, it goes another line further. And just the last thing that Christ says is into thy hands I. And I found myself saying that when I bowed in the Zendo the next time. Now, we are all told or we are all read or we all suppose that the bow is a formality, but more than a formality, that we are giving ourselves over to something that is above and beyond our. Complete understanding and intelligence and accepting our position as. If we're lucky as followers of the Buddha, if we're not that far along, at least we're beginning to get the feel of it.

[09:50]

So the bowing is a body, mind experience that penetrates very deeply. So for me to take. Ron's. Voice and talk and hear Blanche explain that he had made an acceptance of his condition. Reminded me of the days when I was a Christian boy and must somehow or other have felt it in a way that I didn't know at the time. An understanding of the last lines in Luke. Eighty years ago and at a time of need, a time of opportunity for that memory to come back. I didn't hear it out loud, but I heard it.

[10:54]

Now, in the bits and pieces of what was left of the old talk, there were a few notes. When you get to my age and maybe before you think a lot about how you're going to die, not necessarily the disease or the accident, but how if you're conscious, you're going to handle the event. For instance, I have that story about Pavlov and I like so much and how I think that's the way I would like to go. A great teacher as well as a researcher. And he was dying in the wintertime, surrounded by his students who were also his disciples. And he was making long on it. It was going on and on through the hours. And finally, one of the young men goes out in the garden and rolls a snowball and puts it in a bowl by his bed. And they notice that Pavlov is studying it intently.

[11:59]

And then they say that his face lights up. And he says, oh, so that's how it is. Pushing his question to the very last. And I thought how wonderful it would be to be able to do that. But then I realized that any time in the past 24 hours in the past week or certainly in the past month, if I had been in that situation, I would never have been able. what Ron was talking about, not what he was saying. He wasn't explaining himself. But what he was transmitting in his voice, I would never have heard. So this gets me to tell stories. You just have to bear with me.

[13:01]

In addition to being a great writer, he was a nobleman. He was an army officer. This story that he had a picture of Lincoln with him down in Chechnya and how he showed it to the Chechnyans and how impressed they were with Lincoln's demeanor in the picture. Wrote great novels, became interested in religious subjects, tried to reform the Russian peasantry. Busy, busy, busy all his life. Fighting with his wife, too, all the time. And then somehow or other, he realized that there was something missing in his life. So he leaves home. He's sick. He leaves home with a servant, gets on a train and goes as far as the railway station, where he's so sick that they have to take him and put him in the car. A station.

[14:07]

And all the time that he is dying, he is saying, I do not know what it is that I am expected to do again and again and again. And Blanche pointed out, I have been saying the same thing. What is expected of me? What am I going to do? And that has shifted through a number of paradigms, first as a Christian and as a humanist. As a Marxist, then it's been as a Buddhist. But in all of them, there has not been any resolution of that question. What is it that I am expected to do? And then there was another new bit, I guess, maybe something out of a horoscope or advice column that said, You need something completely new to send you off in a different direction.

[15:08]

So I think that I've been put on notice that this disaster of not being able to sit down and write, which I have done ever since I've been this high and tell people something and have people respond to what I say is all direction. Where Ron is is a new direction. How would you bow if you didn't read a book about bowing? And I guess maybe you would learn to do it, just like kids do, doing it over and over again. Suzuki Roshi said one thing that might be helpful to me at this time, just. coming up out of the depths. Someone asked him, why do we bow? And Suzuki Roshi said, when you have bound enough, you will know.

[16:19]

So maybe the thousands and tenth bow will be the one that tells you why you're bowing or the millionth one. So this is a paradigm shift for me now again. I have not been religious in any of the usual ways. So if I have, it has been doing it because everybody else does it. I have been looking for the way intellectually. And the question of why. I can't be happy is involved in this and I can get back to it, I hope, someday. But it was I've been caught by things as it is. Ron's condition, his attitude towards his condition, his telephone, Blanche's remarks, et cetera, so.

[17:26]

All of the causes and conditions of something that I might have for one reason or another overlooked or pay no attention to. So maybe these 30 some years have begun to make some difference in aspects of. This practice that I have observed in others, but which I have not been moved to emulate for myself. I hope you live another 10 or 15 years. I hope we both survive. long enough for me to come to Zen Center for a month or so and do some studying with you.

[18:33]

If I win the city, if I win the grand poetry contest, I might even buy myself a month in San Francisco staying at the city center. He'd entered a poetry contest for $5,000 prize. I'm not interested in his poetry. I'm not interested in my own poetry anymore. I envy him, perhaps. But because we always have the tradition of ending with a poem, if there are any questions, I will hold back on that. But if anyone could understand enough about what I've said to have a question. Yes. Do you think your ability to be happy has anything to do with Christianity, Marxism or Buddhism?

[19:33]

Do you think it has something to do with yourself? Well, as someone who's never been happy, I can't say what the connection would be. How can I answer that? What's your hunch? Well, I can tell you a flat out simple statement. Who's being happy and who is unhappy? And it boils down to that. That's that's that's where you look for the answer to that one. But that's another story. Some of that's upstairs in the wastebasket. I think people make too much of a fuss about it. Seriously, seriously. Let's see if I go. I was happy once or twice. Looking for. I don't like definitions out of the Oxford Dictionary, you know, that tells you what happiness is. I try to create a tableau of some kind.

[20:37]

And what time do we end? OK, so I'll tell I'll tell a old story. I never had a home. I was raised in my grandfather's house and my father sat at the table like one of the uncles. But he did by finding a summer place. And we had an imitation home and imitation family for those few months of the year. But as I got older, after the children were too big to take there every summer, I would go and live in my father's summer place, which my sister had. Or a week or two in October, timing it so that no, you came in June. I came in October when the leaves were turning. And on that day when the fall announced itself, I get up at four o'clock.

[21:40]

I'd walk seven miles through the woods to the Litchfield Cemetery. The old graves are so old that the stones have worn the names are worn off the stone. And I would go and put some four asters that I picked along the way on my father's grave up there on the little hill was the biggest man in the history of Litchfield who had been secretary of the Treasury before the country was made. And my father's family came before the revolution. I began to get the feeling of being part and parcel of that tradition going back. And this particular morning, I would like every morning, but this particular morning, I really needed a drink. But there are no bars in Litchfield, and if they were, they wouldn't be open. But I was lucky. The liquor store was doing inventory, and so they were open. So I got a half pint of brandy, and I bought the New York Times.

[22:44]

And in the New York Times, I read a story about research done on my peculiar neurological difficulties, and then I read a review of a a book about Emily Dickinson called The Passion of Emily Dickinson, which I was aware of. And I went into a little restaurant where I had eaten first at age 17. And that man was now the boss. And we commented on the old days. And it all rolled like that. Everybody talked to me. I talked to everybody else. And generally by that time I would call my sister and say, hey, come and get me. And she'd get me in the car and go home. I said, today I feel so good and I'm going the back way. So I started home. And I was very much amazed the first time I was in Litchfield and noticed that the street numbering was very strange. Number 1620 would be here and right next to it was 1729. And over here was 1650. And over there was 1906.

[23:47]

So I went to the post office. I said, how do you deliver the mail here? He says, we don't. They come and get it. I said, what are those numbers on the houses? That's the years they were built. So here I am. I'm in total, total possession of everything. I'm getting around here. I'm in possession of history going back to the 1492 when our family's first house was built in Switzerland. The ground that I'm on, the people that are surrounding me, the weather is perfect and I could keep going on. Then I come across something I'd never seen before. It looked like a combination of a roadhouse and a checkpoint on an army. There were two very large swans in a very small pond that had been gouged out of the side of the hill, Arabian horses in the paddock.

[24:48]

Very ugly, exotic copper figures on the lawn. And I looked at that and I could not believe it. So I asked my brother in law, what's that? He says, oh, that's the local mafia. A few miles away was one of the politically corrupt towns of Connecticut along the Naugatuck River. And so he moved into the. history of Connecticut. And I moved out because that destroyed my happiness, which had lasted from four in the morning till about ten in the morning. And that was a long time. So how did I get into this? Did I get my mouth shut? Oh, there you are.

[25:51]

Oh, yeah. I just want to say that since that last outburst of one of the martyrs, I've many times... Many times what? I've many times regretted what I said. And at first, I kind of convinced myself that I was justified by saying those things. But over time, I just realized how horrible it was to say such things. First of all, I stopped writing speech. And especially recently, too, I mean, some people said something to me that I didn't like. And I definitely felt really good. And then it reminded me like many times, many times in the past where I've done the same things to others.

[26:59]

And just kind of like, you know, I've heard others. Well, you don't know how fortunate it was for me that you Because that I responded to, I think if you had been any nicer about it, I would have bypassed that question. There are times, look, there are times when these things happen that you are aware of it and that you regret it is fine. But if you feel badly for me, for instance, the other day I was speaking to Blanche about someone whom I had. did not feel very kindly towards. And she said, oh, he's a angry type, just like you.

[28:04]

Hello. But strangely enough, I heard the meaning of what she said and not the spirit in which it might have been said. She's right. She's right. I mean, you know, I'm the one who almost took an axe to his mother and a gun to his grandfather. I mean, I'm rough stuff. So it takes a few hard knocks to get my attention, which you did. Thank you very much. I'm sorry. So now is poem time. I'm going to read one of my own because I don't know any others for this time. When I was young, I lived with God. And in my innocence, I loved him, beard and all. But he was old and with a sense of sin, jealous in a very nasty way.

[29:07]

So every time my youthful eye would stray, he dragged me home, take down his book and read to me of love that others gave. Once God caught me in a field with Homer, who also had a beard, but his was red. God let out such a roar that Homer fled. But when he stuck out his holy foot for me to kiss, I clutched it to me, rose up and threw him down. He hit his head upon a common stone and God was dead. I buried him there among the wheat. The work was easy for his weight was light. And I went home and burned his book. And on his altar, wine stayed six days drunk to wake up sober in an empty room.

[29:55]

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