This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is David Zimmerman, and I have lived and worked here at Zen Center for the last 10 years. This is my first time talking here since my way-seeking mind talk 10 years ago, a few months after I first arrived. So it's an honor to be back, and it's also a little intimidating. So thank you for your patience and your support tonight. Is there anyone new to Zen Center? This is your first time here? Yeah? Great. Warm welcome to you all. Thank you for being here. I was in preparation for this talk thinking about the first time that I arrived here, actually 20 years ago.

[01:00]

And I came to the Saturday morning program and did Zazen instruction and had been coming, you know, more or less ever since. So the thing that brought me to Zen Center was at the time of my life I was looking how to be more present in my life. I wanted to learn how to be presence. And it was something that I'd never really gotten from my family. And I thought maybe meditation would help me to learn how to be presence. And at the time, I was going through a number of difficulties, financial and job-related and relationship stuff. And also my father was... last year of his life in terms of struggling with cancer. And for me, I was imagining that if I could learn to be the presence that he never offered me, then maybe I could reconnect with him and offer a healing for our relationship.

[02:11]

Basically offer him something he couldn't give to me for the sake of my own healing. And so I came and I'm still learning what it means to be present and how to be present. So again, welcome to those of you who are new. May your journey be long and fruitful. A friend had actually recommended Zen Center to me. And so I'm always grateful for Dharma friends, those who kind of give his guidance along the way. After about eight years of kind of, what's the word, dawdling in practice, you know, kind of not so consistent, but trying to sit at home and come here, you know, infrequently on and off, I finally decided to get serious. And so I moved into Zen Center in October 2000. So as of this October, it's been 10 years. And I spent the first year and a half here at City Center.

[03:14]

And then at some point I decided that I needed to get even more serious. about my practice, and with the encouragement of my teacher, Tia, decided to go to Tassajara, which is our monastery in the Los Pages National Forest, which is near Big Sur. So I spent the last eight years there, and just this year, in May, I finally returned. I was cooked, and they let me come out, and here I am. And it's been an interesting transition. coming back after eight years in the wilderness, eight years in the monastery, back to an urban temple, back to the city, back to everything one would say there in the world, and everything the world has to offer. And I found it, I am finding it, a real test of my constancy and my reliance on practice. finding that I really need to find what is my ground and what I need to rely on in order to be here in the city.

[04:18]

It's kind of easy when you're at Tassajara where things are a little bit more quiet and steady and rhythmic. In the city, it's not that way. So to find one's way again in this chaos has been very interesting for me. And I have to tell you that while it's not totally expected, I have been feeling some kind of disorientation and a sense of unsettledness. You know, the first two months was kind of a honeymoon. Yay, I'm back in the city, go to movies, eat, you know, and so on. But then the honeymoon was over, and things started to settle in, and I realized, ooh, I'm here now. I'm here. And where am I going? What am I doing here? And so the last number of months have been kind of this chewing over these kind of particular... and kind of sensations that are coming up as I make this transition. And I'm kind of, you know, very aware in the ways that I'm wobbling and I'm unsteady, uncertain in certain areas of my practice at this time.

[05:21]

But I'm also very grateful to have a practice that encourages us to be very observant and just watch and let things pass without trying to react too much. So with... With this transition has come a lot of kind of doubt in some ways about where am I going? What am I doing? Why am I here? And a lot of the questions that I put on the back burner for the last eight years while I was at Tassahara seem to be coming up again. And they're coming up stronger and more insistent. And Tassahara has a way of kind of certain things like Relationship questions, you know, for me, I just kind of said, okay, I'm not going to address that now. You know, retirement, work in the world, just put that all in the back and just do whatever I'm told to with Tassajara. That's our practice. Just do what you're asked and just show up. But now that I'm here, that kind of container is no longer holding me in that same way.

[06:27]

And this is the much porous container here. And I find with that, there's leaking happening. You know, things are beginning to spring out. And with that comes the sense of being unsettled. And like I said, there's questions of what am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? How long do I want to stay at Zen Center? Do I want to retire at Zen Center? Can I imagine being here another 20 years? What would I do? Do I want a relationship again now that I'm here in the city? You know? And what am I doing with my life? all these questions for me have kind of boiled down to this one thing which is, you know, I keep koan, is what am I doing here? And I've unpacked that koan in some sense as what is my practice now? And how am I doing my practice? And so I keep coming back to that as a way of not falling into the

[07:32]

It's the unsettledness that can arise if I start going too far into the ideas. Many years ago, I was living in Indonesia, and I had moved there in order to kind of clarify what I wanted to be in the world. I thought I would teach and do some development work, and that would give me a clue of what my path in life was going to be. But shortly after I got there, the Asian economic crisis hit, and my... Salary shrank to basically nothing. And there was a lot of social unrest due to the political circumstances. And I was also, again, the honeymoon was over. I was like, wait, what am I doing here? What's going on? And so I've been thinking about this again. It's like, here I am again. That's coming up. This is, again, in a certain way, a foreign country to come back to the city after many years in a monastery. At the time, a friend of mine sent me a poem that I'd like to share with you tonight.

[08:35]

And I'd like to read this poem, and then I want to kind of unpack the teachings that it has for me. The poem is called Lost, and it's by David Wagner. It's actually a preface piece in front of David White's book, The House of Belonging. Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here. You must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers. I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying, here. No two trees are the same to the raven.

[09:37]

No two branches the same to the wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. When I read this poem, I'm often reminded of Dante's opening line in the Inferno, if I'm correct. And the line is, in the middle of this road we call our life. I found myself in a dark wood with no clear path through. Finding oneself in a dark wood is often a metaphor for entering either a midlife transition or a spiritual crisis of some sorts. And while I wouldn't say what I'm going through right now is a spiritual crisis, I am aware that it's a very strong place of questioning and of the unknown.

[10:42]

And I'm also aware that at age 47, I'm getting kind of close to that so-called midlife point and aware that I'm entering another proverbial woods. So I don't know how many of you who are 50 and over... had a similar experience, or you might even had that when you were younger. My guess is we go through it several times in our lives. Part of what's coming up for me right now is now that I'm back in the city, I'm hearing more of the messages that society tells us about who we should be and where we should be and what we should have at particular points in our lives. So after eight years in the monastery and being... a Zen priest, I come back and realize I don't have a lot of what society and our culture says we should have in order to be valued, to be worthy. I don't have a spouse. I don't have a family. The Zen center is my family.

[11:46]

But I don't have children. I don't have a house. I don't have a particular title. I don't make hardly any money. I don't have a retirement package. I don't have a 401k. I have nothing. that society says is a qualifier for a successful and worthy life. So what do I do with this when I hear these messages, when I am surrounded again by them? It's easy to lose our way in life, particularly if we follow all the markers that society and our friends and our family lay out for us. I am actually someone who's particularly proud of the fact that I generally don't get lost. You know, I have a very good sense of direction. I know where I'm going. I know where I want to go when I go hiking. I usually have a map. You know, I traveled for a year through Asia. I mapped out every day of my trip through Asia what I was going to do, where I was going. And it was a little flexibility in there, but it kind of tells you how anal retentive I am.

[12:50]

Anyhow, so, you know... It's not a sense of space for me that's been the challenge. It's more the sense of, in terms of my life journey, what is the map of that journey and how do I find my place? How do I find where I'm at? And I've realized that at times I'm still using a faulty map or a faulty GPS system, if you will. I'm still taking directions at times from the small self, the small mind, the one that worries about what's going to happen to me? For many years, particularly in the decade before I came to Zen Center, I was struggling with the question of what do I want to be in the world? And a lot of that energy was going into finding the right career and the right job. But I never found the right career and I never found the right job. So I came to Zen Center. I decided at some point in my life I needed, rather than to focus on the question of what to be in the world,

[13:53]

to focus on how to be in the world. So I figured I'd come here and get a graduate degree in how to be in the world. And I'm still learning how to be in the world. And unfortunately, that what question keeps popping back up. When I did my journey through Asia, that was one of the questions that I had, how to be in the world. And after a year, I came back thinking I would know more. And I also came back feeling very unsettled and disoriented. And I found that in my time there, it had stripped away a lot of the things that before I thought would give me certainty and guarantees. I had somehow probably absorbed a certain Eastern thought, an Eastern way of living that was much more relaxed. much more in the moment in many ways, less inclined towards, in many cases, worrying about wealth, lots of wealth or status.

[14:57]

Not to say that that doesn't happen there, but there was a more relaxed way of being that I learned while traveling through Asia. So when I came back, like I said, I found myself feeling disoriented and lost. And when we're lost, we often get in some way turned around. Maybe we get distracted by something on the side of the road or in the distance. Something that maybe holds a promise for us. They think we'll be better than what we already have. Or we get lost in thinking and daydreaming and then at some point wake up and find out we don't know where we're at and how we got here. We lost sight of the path that we thought we were on. Or we choose the wrong path. and find out we've headed in some direction that we didn't really intend to head. Or the path itself maybe grows thin or overgrown and eventually is no longer apparent and we find ourselves in the middle of the wilderness.

[15:59]

You've probably realized by now that what was happening for me and what happens when this comes up for me is the sense that I've lost touch with myself in some way. I've lost connection to who I am and what I am. And when I do that, I go astray. And rather than turning back to my true self, I make a mistake and turn outwards to find an answer and an orientation. It's easy to become lost whenever we lose touch with ourselves and with the full extent of our possibilities, even if momentarily. In many cases, we break contact with what is deepest in us. our integrity, our truth, our hearts, our innate wisdom, our Buddha nature. So what does this poem, Lost, teaches us about what to do when we lose our way? What does it teach us about the practice of entering a dark woods in life with many questions and wondering how to proceed?

[17:13]

Wagner opens the poem with a very strong practice reminder, the thing that we come back to, stand still. The standing still is the stopping of zazen. As practitioners, that is what we do first, or should do first, whenever we're off balance, off course, out of harmony with ourselves and with the integrity, with our own integrity, with the world around us. You need to come back to stillness. Suzuki Roshi says that as Zen students, our life begins with practice. In Zazen, we come back to zero and start from zero. In Zazen, we stop moving. We stop grasping. We stop seeking. And we settle into non-activity, non-seeking, non-grasping. This is the place of shikantaza, just sitting, just being, being still and simply observing where we are and what is happening without moving forwards or backwards.

[18:30]

In his book, Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn speaks to how the practice of meditation is a path. When you practice meditation, we are really acknowledging that in this moment, we are on the road of life. Meditation is more rightly thought of as a path, a way, than a technique. It is a way of being, a way of living, a way of listening, a way of walking along the path of life and being in harmony with things as they are. This means in part acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going, and even where the path lies. So what to do? Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost. Everything in nature knows its place, knows where it needs to be.

[19:35]

Nature doesn't spend time questioning, what am I doing here? Where am I going? What should I do? Where should I go? The world of nature and trees and bushes are never lost. They know their place. They know where they stand. They know their Dharma position. It is the way of nature to exhibit this, to remind us of reorienting to exactly where and what we are in this moment. Wherever you are, is called here. I can never really leave here in this moment in its totality, as it goes with me wherever I am. There is no other place than here. This here is unchanging, yet constantly in flux. It is the hardest stillness around which my perceptions of impermanence revolve.

[20:38]

and you must treat it as a powerful stranger. While the here of the present moment is never foreign, I must still approach it as something unknown, something with great capacity and power, something to be treated with respect and not taken for granted. I must ask permission to know it and be known. This is how I show respect for what is before me, for this moment here and now, not to assume familiarity, not to take it for granted, to be given the due that is regarded. The Latin root of the word respect means to look again, to see again. Can I see this moment, this place, with new eyes, to look deeper,

[21:41]

to look again for what I may have missed before. When I do this, I also equally invite and request the moment to fully know me, to become intimate with my own being, also new in this moment, also not known before. This is how I come to know myself, and to draw out my concepts of what is, and simply to engage with what is as it is. In his book, Return to Silence, Katagiri Roshi says, all beings want to know who they are. This is the natural state of everyone's heart, to seek for the knowledge of who one is. Even the trees wants to know what it is. The tree that you understand by projecting yourself onto it It's just the concept of a tree that you have.

[22:43]

The real tree is nothing but a being that is just arising. There is nothing to compare, nothing to criticize, nothing to evaluate. If you really want to know the tree as it really is, you should work with the tree. Simultaneously, this is the best way to know who you are. Am I willing to discover what I don't know? Am I willing to abide in a state of inquiry and open curiosity? Am I willing to rest in the unknown? Usually we find that we are lost in thinking and concepts. We believe the dream of our minds and our thoughts. We get lost in this dream, the dream that's dreamt and produced by society. and culture, our family and media. And oftentimes, believing in this dream, we find that somewhere deep inside, we're extremely dissatisfied, extremely unhappy.

[23:54]

And rather than wake up from the dream, we decide maybe to distract ourselves. I came back from Tassajara, and you should know how many Lady Gaga videos I watched. How much I got onto YouTube and was looking all over the place. And, you know, I'm into South Park. I'm into Glee. You know, it's just like, yay, something to distract me from what is happening here. So I sedate myself. Or maybe I stop halfway on this journey. And perhaps I shut down. Perhaps I end up falling asleep in my life and die there without ever waking up. So like I said, one of the reasons I came to Zen Center was I was looking to learn how to be present in my life at a time when my father was dying. Today is my father's 70th birthday.

[24:55]

He died a little less than a year after I came to Zen Center. And I need to thank him because of our relationship I am here. And because of our relationship, or rather the lack of it, I had a very strong impetus to discover what I wanted in my life, to learn how to be present and honest and kind and live with integrity. The night before my father's funeral, I wrote a letter to him, all the things I wanted to say that I never had and now never would. And in it, I include a stanza from one of my favorite poems. Another poem, Requiem by Rainier Maria Rocha. If you are still here with me, if in this darkness there is still some place where your spirit resonates on the shallow sound waves stirred up by my voice, hear me, help me.

[26:02]

We can so easily slip back from what we have struggled to attain abruptly into a life we never wanted, can find that we are trapped as in a dream and die there without ever waking up. This can occur. My father represented for me a life unlived, unexamined, not present, a life that was somehow lost. I came to practice because I realized that I wanted to wake up in some way, to fully taste the truth of life and what it means to be alive. My intention in coming to practice was to learn how to be present, to be the presence that others, such as my father and mother, were unable to provide. To be so present that nothing would ever really be lost when death finally came, because I had not lived my life asleep or disconnected. The forest breathes.

[27:07]

Listen. This too is our practice, to stop and deeply listen. Zazen, I stop and I attend to the breath and the body and the hearts and the mind with complete attention. I come back to this place of the present moments by simply listening. When I truly hear, I am truly here. When I can attend to my breath, I am attending to the whole world. The whole world is the forest in which I find myself and is alive and dynamic and rhythmic and breathing, and it is not separate from me. I just have to listen to the truths of the world, of the forest, of my own truths. This is the practice of Avalokiteshvara.

[28:08]

the one who hears the cries of the world and receives the cries of the world. Unfortunately, it seems that our world is having a lot of difficulty because humans, I think it's humans mostly, are not listening to themselves or to nature or to what's needed at this time. And so the forest is dying and it's harder to breathe. and the world is dying. And we are causing great devastation because we are falling asleep. We're falling into a coma of ignorance and denial and activity. What would the forest say if we truly listened? It answers, I have made this place around you. The forest of life has made us. We are life. We are this dynamic relationship a relationship of call and response.

[29:09]

When the world calls out, then I need to attend to it. And when I call out, if I look closely, the world really attends to me. My listening becomes a request. My asking permission to know what is before me and my willingness to be known by life itself brings forth a response. This forest we are in, this life, this Buddha nature, has made the here where I find myself. This Dharma forest is none other than everything coming forth in this moment exactly as this moment. Know that the forest is life and we are life. The human is life and the tree is life. Life must be the tree and life must be the human. Life has made this place around you. This place around you is your life.

[30:12]

This is dependent co-arising. This is Buddha. Katagiri again reminds us that trees are always speaking about their original principle or Buddha. This is called Dharma or teaching. Everything comes a teaching for us. We realize Buddha in every single existence. We realize all sentient beings are Buddha. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying, here. The minute I have wandered, the minute I stray, I become lost from this moment, my connection to all things and its completeness. As Steve told us on Saturday in his Dharma talk, all I really need to do is reach down and touch the earth, for the earth is the ground of my life as it's arising. It is my witness. To touch the earth and have it name my right to be here, and my life and my relationship to it, brings me back to this place.

[31:20]

No two trees are the same to the raven, no two branches the same to the wren. How often do I stop and look at the uniqueness of things, to know each object, each person in their uniqueness? as something different, as something new, as not necessarily me. By knowing the intimacy of things, by knowing what a raven is, by knowing what a wren is, I know each moment in its uniqueness, its once-at-this-time quality, and I am always on the path. In doing so, the path is created before me by my becoming acquainted with it, by acknowledging and celebrating the role and function and Dharma's position of each and everything I encounter. If what a tree or bush does is lost in you, you are surely lost.

[32:27]

What does a bush do? What does a tree do? Have you ever noticed they don't do anything? They just are. They simply are. They are doing nothing. Unlike us humans who are always busy, [...] busy. It's really hard to just be. I define myself so often by what have I accomplished. And I'm afraid at times to just be. If you notice, a tree and a bush meets all things and greets all things without preference. The weather, the cold, the sun, the animals who come to nibble on it, the bugs that come to live on it. There is no preference. It meets everything, engages everything without turning away, without looking elsewhere, at the same time without leaving their Dharma position.

[33:39]

Can we be like this? Meeting all things without preference, equally. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. This speaks to Dogen's statement in the Ganjo Koan. To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth that illuminate the self. is awakening. When I stand or sit still and let the myriad things come forth on their own accord, without grasping, without manipulating, without seeking or squirming, then the whole universe comes forward and shows me where I am and who I am. And I find that I am already at my destination, I am already home.

[34:41]

I can never leave this place, for it is me, through and through. It is only my not seeing this that I become lost, not seeing things as it is, not seeing my interconnectedness, not seeing how I am the myriad causes and conditions coming forth in a particular unique expression called David. I'm not the same expression as a raven or a wren or a tree or a branch, but I'm my own place and my own expression. You know, we locate ourselves by knowing our relationship with others. And yet, there really is no other inherently existing separately from us. So if we let awareness come forward, let presence come forward, we become the presence that we are seeking for ourselves and for each other.

[35:53]

By being presence for others, we help others to know who they are and where they are. I want to consider for a moment what actually becoming lost can teach me. Perhaps by becoming lost, I can actually learn a greater intimacy with what is essential in my life. A year after the Basin Complex fire in 2008, this was a major wildfire, I think it was the third largest, third or second largest fire in California history that burned most of the Los Padres wilderness around Tassajara. Tassajara was in the middle of it. A year after the fire, You know, all the landscape had been burned. There were a lot of dead trees. The earth was scorched. But a year afterwards, the green was coming back again, slowly.

[36:57]

And a lot of people like to hike in the area around Tassajara. It's a beautiful hiking area. But the fire had wiped out many of the trails, either because they just burned the vegetation, which kind of outlined the trail, or the movement of earth. and so on, obliterated the trails. Or the new growth that came up, the new weeds covered the trails, and so you couldn't find them. So a number of people that summer got lost in the wilderness around Tassajara. A new student, this was in April, one of the first people to get lost, he'd only been there at Tassajara for a few weeks, decided one evening to go out after dinner and hike the horse pasture trail. Because, you know, people who know Tassahar know you don't hike the horse pasture trail at night after dinner because you won't get back. It's about a two and a half hour hike. But he'd never been before and he thought he'd just give it a try. Well, we had a very important meeting that night. And after we realized he hadn't shown up for the meeting, we went to his room, checked on him.

[38:02]

He wasn't there. Someone said, oh, I think he went out up the road and maybe he was talking about going to check out the horse pasture trail. So alarmed. It was beginning to rain. It was a cold night. We were concerned. We sent out three search parties looking for him. After about two hours or so, one of the search parties found him. He was on the horse pasture trail. And it was a moonless night, so all they had were their flashlights. And again, they too were navigating landscape that was basically obliterated. So they too had to find the trail as they were searching for him. By luck, they also, they had whistles, by the way. By luck, he had his iPod with him. And in call and response through the mountains, they finally heard him, and he heard them. And they could locate him in the darkness because of his iPod, the little light that was shining from it. Now, even though they eventually found him, it took an hour from the time that they saw his iPod light to actually make their way through the landscape there, because there's a lot of

[39:09]

steep mountains and the trail, again, like I said, wasn't very apparent. Cliffs all around, they had to be very careful. Anyhow, they finally connected with him and were able to bring him back safely. Later in the summer, a number of other guests kind of got lost and other stories I've heard during that summer. Another student who was familiar with the trails later in the summer wandered out, decided to go on a long hike, didn't make it back. The next morning when we found, figured out he was not there we send out search parties we didn't find him so finally i called the wilderness rescue service they sent out a helicopter shortly after that he stumbled back into tasahar covered in soots and ashes and scratched and tired and dehydrated but he was okay so i had to call off the fortunately the helicopter service but both of these people came back to Tassajara wide-eyed.

[40:09]

You could tell that they had experienced something and had a greater sense of something more unique in their lives, and particularly the impermanence of their life. While you can say these people got lost in the trails because they weren't very clear trails, I think perhaps in some ways they consciously and deliberately got lost. I imagine that perhaps these hikers got lost because they heard or felt a particular call and invitation from the wilderness to lose themselves in the landscape of transformation. Like I said, the wilderness around Tassahar was a transition time, coming from death to life again. And in this landscape, there were no clear trails or paths. This landscape simultaneously expressed impermanence and loss and death and life and regeneration and persistence.

[41:14]

And I felt a great attraction to it. I felt a great attraction to the vulnerability and the essentialness of the landscape before me. It reminded me of something very essential. And it was this proximity of life and death that was intoxicating. for it showed me the non-dualism of our being. It showed the interdependence of living and dying. It showed that there is not just life and there is not just death and they are not separate things. It showed life-death as one word. The wilderness at that time for me was the manifestation of life-death. the oneness of this realm of existence. So I imagine that people were compelled to get lost in this landscape in order to be more intimate with this very essentialness of life, to lose themselves in the greater forest that is life-death.

[42:27]

Perhaps they wanted to roll around in the ash and the new shoots and the decaying landscape, and the little blossoms that were coming up, like dogs like to roll around on fresh carcass and rotting animals. They do it with a certain glee to get very intimate, to get the sense of death or whatever all over them. To become lost in the words and encounter the possibility of losing our lives is compelling, but because it immediately reinforces our sense of being alive. And it wakes us up to the preciousness of our life. I think all of us who live in the building are feeling this right now with our Dharma friend, Jerome, who died on Sunday here in this building and lays in room one as we sit here in this room. I was sitting with Jerome this morning and the koan came up for me in which

[43:33]

A student and a master go to a memorial service for someone who has just died. And a student points to the corpse and asks the master, dead or alive? And the master says, won't say. And the student again says, dead or alive? And the master says, won't say. And the student continues to persist and try to get an answer that he can accept from his teacher to the point where he starts beating his teacher out of frustration. Many years later, the student tells the story, if I have this correct, to another teacher. And the teacher says, what kindness, basically, what kindness your teacher showed you. And in that moment, the student got it. You can't say life, death. What is that in the other room?

[44:35]

It was Jerome. Is it no longer Jerome? What is it now? What do we feel when we think of Jerome now? What do we feel when we look at him now in his state? I touched his body this morning, and it was cold. The kind of slightly pliable but hard sense that bodies have after they've died. And all I could say was, thank you, Jerome. for being alive. And I thank you for dying because it's showing us our life and death right there. Recently I saw the film 127 Hours. How many people have seen that film? It's based on a true story. It's a drama citation of a hiker, Aaron Ralston, who in April of 2003 hiked into the Utah wilderness. and gets trapped when a boulder falls on his arm and pins his hand.

[45:39]

And he spends the next five days, the next 127 hours, reexamining the eras of his life where he fights the elements to stay alive. He's literally trapped between a rock, the boulder, and a hard place, a rock wall. He's in a space about this wide for five days. And no one knew where he was at because he didn't bother to tell anyone. And he didn't go hiking with anyone. So no one knew to look for him. So as he became weaker and on the verge of death, he finally entered a state of delirium. And in that state, he had a vision. And the vision was of a child, his son not yet born. And this vision inspires for him a desire to live to the extent that he severs his arm in order to be freed from the boulder. He escapes the canyon that he's in, is eventually found, and makes his world back.

[46:46]

And as far as I know to this day, he is still hiking, skiing, mountain climbing, all these things. But he's learned this lesson, which is always go with someone and tell them where you're going. The other The thing that this story brings up for me, the question is, what am I willing to let go of in order to really live? When I find myself between a rock and a hard place, usually those are my ideas about how things should be in my own self-clinging. What am I willing to sacrifice? What am I willing to let go of or sever in order to be free, in order to be liberated from my suffering? What baggage of attachments and ideas and dreams about what I need to be happy am I willing to let go of? And let life find me as I am where I am.

[47:47]

Aaron Ralston's cutting his arm off in order to be liberated reminds me of the story of Rekha cutting off his own arm to prove to his teacher Bodhidharma that he was generally serious about his practice. deeply sincere, sincere enough to forsake his arm. And he did this because he knew he was not his body. He was not his arm. He knew he didn't need that in order to be truly liberated. He knew that his true self was more vast and more boundless. And this knowledge was his path to practice, to liberation, and to awakening. I find I'm only lost as long as I'm holding on to something, an idea of what I'm supposed to be in life. When I believe the self-doubt in stories about my worth and value, then I suffer.

[48:50]

And that suffering brought me here, and maybe it's brought you here today, and maybe it keeps... keeps you coming back and again and again because, like me, maybe it takes a long time to get that story. It takes a long time to strip away everything that you're grasping or that clings to you, that you say is me. Are you willing to let go of your prison and be free? And when you do get lost, you need to turn again or I need to turn again to that which inspires me. For Aaron, it was the vision of having a son, of someone to love and care for. For me, it was the promise of connection and truth that comes with being fully present in this moment. So while few of us need to do the drastic steps of cutting off our arms, we still need to, in small ways, in our practice, in our zazen,

[49:55]

continue to let go of the hindrances of self-clinging and to come back to again to the sense of connection with others which energizes our journey to freedom. It is compassion that keeps us grounded, that keeps us here. Where then do I find my true path? I find it by stepping into freedom of not knowing and choosing to become truly lost, truly lost in the uncharted territory of the present moment. When I truly let go of my ideas of who I am, or who I should be, or the value of what I'm doing, then I'm able to move forward and be available, if you will, for the possibility of dropping off body and mind, as Dogen teaches us. Letting go is a stepping into the space of uncharted freedom that comes when we can simply engage our life from a place of practice.

[51:07]

Then everything we do becomes our path of practice when we bring a fully present mind and heart to it. So the question again of what am I doing here is really a question of what is my practice now? How am I practicing with this? And with that question, the path unfolds. Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger. Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying, here. No two trees are the same to the raven.

[52:09]

No two branches are the same to the wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost in you, you are surely lost. Stand still. Sit still. The forest of life knows where you are. You must let it find you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. 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.

[53:05]

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