intensive at the Zen Center, the topic of Zen and work. And as you might imagine, it has all changed with what's happening in the world. And of course, we're still interested in this topic, but now it's like, how do we, what is it like to practice with these unprecedented and changing times and thrilled Norman, to have you be joining our intensive. And I see people, old friends from Everyday Zen and from Zen Center and from around. There's some people from around the world here this evening. So I don't think you need an introduction. So thank you. Thank you very much for agreeing to give the talk this evening. Thank you, Mark. It's really nice to be here. I'm glad to be able to talk to people tonight.

[01:00]

So I hope everybody's okay. Here in California, we are sheltering in place. That's the term of art. Not going anywhere, not shopping, not doing anything, staying at home. Kathy and I are okay here at Muir Beach. And for us, as long as we manage not to get sick and die, we're okay. We're doing pretty well. In fact, we can appreciate life slowing down, trips being canceled, not getting in the car. It's not bad. But at the same time, we're thinking every day about people for whom this restriction is not so easy, and especially about those who have the virus now or will get it. and maybe quite ill and maybe die. We're also thinking every day about the workers in the healthcare system who are already working really hard, very hard, dealing with the pandemic and face who knows what kind of catastrophe if this gets out of control.

[02:17]

So we're gonna hope and imagine that with everything that everybody's doing it gets better rather than worse and i'm actually hoping and i'm actually praying that that's going to be so so nobody can think about anything but this pandemic and the uncertainty of the near and far future on many levels this affects us but before we were thinking about this we had a lot of other things think about that made life trying in our times though these other things did not stop us in our tracks the way this one has well maybe they should have stopped us in our tracks a long ago climate change for one is something that really worries me and an economic system that is hard for everyone but the rich and the increasingly

[03:21]

anti-democratic politics all over the world, and the speeding up and stressing out of our lives due to accelerating technologies and other pressures. So we have a lot of ongoing, serious long-term problems. Others that I haven't mentioned, of course, lots of them. And altogether, they make us wonder, I think, whether we're approaching some sort of human limit that makes the future for human beings uncertain and dark. The future is the future. Nobody ever knows what's going to happen in the future. The future is not the present, as we always say in Buddha Dharma. And yet, in the present, we have a feeling. about the future.

[04:22]

And that feeling that we have about the future conditions how we live and how we feel in the present. So we really cannot dismiss all this or philosophize it away. And it's not the first time human beings have felt like this. When I was a boy in elementary school, we hid under our desks in simulated air raids waiting for the russian atom bombs to drop by the 1980s with thousands of advanced nuclear warheads in the cold war at its maximum we felt sure that nuclear holocaust was inevitable and there was a big movement against nuclear weapons today There are still a huge number of nuclear weapons around the world and countries that have them now that didn't have them then.

[05:24]

But we don't think about this at all because we have so many other crises to worry about. And I can only imagine what my parents and grandparents felt about the human future in the time of Hitler. When if you were Jewish, you were either being killed or your family members were being killed somewhere. And even if you weren't a Jew, you were one way or the other involved in a world war effort. Really scary with an unsure outcome. And then long before that, during the Black Plague in Europe, It's unbelievable, but actually, like every third person, maybe more, but at least every third person died.

[06:25]

And nobody knew why. Other than that it was the wrath of God displeased with us. So there have been many, many times in the past when people had a strong feeling of dread about the future. So I'm not saying, of course, that our contemporary problems are not really serious or even unprecedented. I'm just saying that the human feeling of dread for the future is not new. In fact, it seems to go with the territory of being a human being, because we have the idea of the future, and we care about the future. with people in the future, so we uniquely have this kind of dread. So I want to ask a stupid question about this, which is the Zen question. Who is feeling this dread?

[07:29]

We were brought up to expect something else, some bright future. with a wealth of possibilities. We are, after all, modern people. We have science, we have technology. It was not supposed to be this way. So I really think a lot of what we're feeling right now, in addition to our fear about this virus, is a tremendous sense of shock and disappointment. We've been cheated out of a bright future we had expected. And we're mad about it and we're scared. And we want to know, who do we blame? We can blame the government or the wealthy. Probably that's good.

[08:35]

Probably they are to blame. They could be doing better for all of us. But maybe we don't blame them, maybe we blame them, and also blame ourselves, blame humanity. But the thought that humanity is somehow unworthy or incompetent, or maybe some kind of blight on the planet, a thought that has crossed my mind more than once, that's a terrible thought to have if you're human. Because then you hate yourself. And it's really hard to live with that kind of hatred. So I'm interested in the modern self. The persons that we all have been conditioned to be in our particular historical period. What is a person, after all?

[09:38]

We take it for granted. that everybody knows what a person is, a person is a person, that being a person has always been more or less the same thing. But I don't think that's right at all. I think that in the Tang or Song dynasties in China, when our Zen ancestors practiced together and produced the stories and legends we still study today, there were no persons. There were no selves. in anything like the way that we ourselves know. So what are the hidden assumptions that underlie the modern self? These are things that we take for granted, but actually they're assumptions. People may not have assumed these things in the past. For one, we have inner lives, right? inner lives.

[10:42]

Freud gave us the idea that there's an unconscious, a dark subterranean pool full of passions and confusions that conceal the truth of who we are, but not entirely. The analyst can help us discover our hidden depths. I don't think Freud thought that he invented the unconscious. I think he thought that he discovered it. But this doesn't mean it was always there. I wonder whether Jesus or Buddha or Zhaozhou had an unconscious. I bet they did not. Maybe in order to grow an unconscious, we had to tame and disenchant the world. And maybe the world inserted the unconscious into our psyches as a form of revenge.

[11:44]

If you don't have an unconscious, then there's no need to be someone special. There's no need to appease your id or superego. No need to justify your life as worthwhile in the face of your deep-seated fear that it's not. No need to make your way in the world or make your mark. Nothing. eats at you, nothing drives you on. Probably people in ancient times were just born. They knew whose son or daughter they were. They knew what they had to do. They had no choices, really, or visions or big hopes for the future. Probably they didn't even have an idea of the future that would be different from the present or the past. Maybe they had children or not. They worked hard. They worshipped according to their community norms. And then they died and went on to another life. Maybe if they were in the Christian West, they went to heaven or hell.

[12:52]

If they were in Asia, maybe they went on to another lifetime, maybe a better lifetime. It's always amazed me that all over the world, ancient peoples, who very likely had no contact with one another, all produced the thought that the world was both a wonderful and a fearful place that might cease at any moment. You couldn't count on the world being there every day. In order to ensure that the world continued, human beings had to acknowledge the gods who empowered it. Everywhere in the world, in ancient times, people spontaneously understood the necessity of sacrificing to the gods, something that would absolutely never occur to a modern self that thinks it's in charge of and knowledgeable about a rational world that operates according to knowable scientific laws.

[14:07]

The idea of sacrifice to sensible, invisible powers beyond ourselves could never occur to us. Because to us, there's nothing really beyond ourselves. So I've always been, as I said, so amazed by and really impressed by this insight that sacrifice to the gods is a human necessity, even though as a modern person, of course, I can't begin to understand it. So I'm saying being a modern self is, first of all, having an inner life, an unconscious, having the sort of inner life and high self-regard that people before the modern period probably did not have. A second unexamined assumption of the modern self, again, so pervasive we don't even notice it, is the validation and assumed value of everyday life, that it's worthwhile, that it has a meaning.

[15:14]

Just life, you know, living, working, loving, having a family, having some fun, having some self-realization. We think that all this is really good and that everyone is entitled to it. This is an assumption of the modern self. When Nanchuan told Zhaozhou that everyday mind is the way, I don't think he was referring to everyday life as we understand it now. I think he meant the radical present moment as it is, with all its limitation and tragedy, the difficulty of living that people may have wanted to escape. He was saying, no, this difficult life is the way, is the path. The escape is no escape. That was a radical idea, a profound teaching that takes a lifetime to appreciate.

[16:16]

Because in ancient China, I don't think the average person expected life to be worthwhile or fulfilling. Life was a veil of tears. Life was a struggle. an unfortunate slog that you had to go through to get, you hoped, to a better rebirth, maybe one day far into an imagined future that wasn't a future in the world we now take to be real, sometime maybe you'd be born as a bodhisattva and you could meet a Buddha, maybe. That was what was important. This life, not so much. Ordinary life was not something, You clung to or celebrated. It was just a trial. And it took strength to endure it. A third assumption of the modern self is that we live in nature.

[17:22]

And that nature is something sacred and benign and profound. It's a source of inspiration, abundance and material support. assumption we make before before this i think everyone understood that nature is is rough and brutal violent i think to be feared and used when you could use it and i think the chinese thought that way too despite the impression you might get from chinese nature poetry the production of whose ink sticks deforested China many, many centuries ago. In the West, it was the Romantics and the Transcendentalists who changed nature for us a few centuries ago, who made nature into the inspiration for their modern selves in revolt against industrial modernity.

[18:25]

When there was the first machine, there was the first person complaining about the first machine. So this view of nature, you can feel, goes along with our inwardness. As we swell inside and we get bigger, we project an outside that is not us. And if we're inside and nature, which is separate from us, is outside, so are other people outside. They are not us and we are not them. So our unconscious gives us a strong inner power, an enormous self-regard, but also a strong built-in sense of alienation. And alienation, you know, is a 20th century word. Everybody in the 20th century was thinking only about alienation and how alienating contemporary life had been.

[19:29]

We don't use that word so much anymore, but that was the word then. Another assumption of the modern self, which also seems so obvious we would never question it, is that knowledge is possible. We can investigate and we can know something for sure. In other words, science. Which, when you think about it, is an inevitable outcome of the third assumption. The otherness of nature and other people and the inwardness of me gives me an object. outside myself, that I can study. Because object of knowledge requires objects, and objects are there when there are subjects. The subject is studying the object, and the subject knows the object. So scientific knowledge requires our separation from nature and from one another. So we modern people, of course, we can know things we think, we can understand things.

[20:32]

And this is why we feel so superior to the ancients who, God love them, they understood things, but their understanding was almost like a child. It was so crude and so silly by the standards of what we know now. So I'm sure all of you know the old Zen saying, not knowing is most intimate. We love not knowing in Zen. We praise not knowing. In the dialogue I mentioned earlier between Nan Chuan and Zhao Zhao, Zhao Zhao says, if the way is everyday mind, he just heard from Nan Chuan, the way is everyday mind, if the way is everyday mind, how can I know it? And Nan Chuan replies, everyday mind has nothing to do with knowing and not knowing. The not knowing mind isn't ignorant. It doesn't deny scientific or any other kind of knowing. But it does recognize that knowledge is not ultimately true.

[21:40]

It does know that knowledge separates and alienates. In other words, to see that everyday mind is the way is to see that knowledge including maybe especially including knowledge of oneself, is not ultimate knowledge. And that you tear the fabric of reality when you unthinkingly believe that it is. So when we think about the world we live in now, with the feelings we have right now of dread or fear, or maybe we have hope or lack of hope about the future, we have to realize that our feelings are not based on something necessarily accurate or true, but on a host of unexamined assumptions that go along with our being conditioned as modern selves.

[22:47]

Now, I'm not saying that the information we have about the world is not good information. And I'm not saying that there's something wrong with our being the way we are. Because of course we have the assumptions we have. Everything that's happened before has led us to this place. How could we be other than as we are? And how could we stop knowing the things that we know? So I'm not saying that. What I'm trying to say is that it would make a very big difference if we were not blind to our assumptions and our viewpoints. And to know that, of course, we are blinded by such things. And when we appreciate this, we will feel things differently and we will act differently.

[23:57]

in the world and here is to me why zazen is so great and why i'm so relieved and so happy that i can sit zazen every day and go to a lot of sessions nowadays there's a lot of meditation being discussed and practiced and taught and i'm glad i'm sure all of it is really good And zazen is just basic garden variety meditation. There's nothing fancy or profound about zazen. It's just meditation. But the way we understand zazen and the way we feel about zazen, the way Dogen and Suzuki Roshi understand zazen, this, I think, is really great. And this, I think, is what heals us. Why it's so important for us now. Because when we sit in Zazen, we're sitting in the middle of our human selves and all our human assumptions.

[25:08]

We're not, as we usually are, standing on the ground of ourself and our many assumptions about reality, looking out and reaching out from that ground. No, when we're doing zazen, we're sitting down in the middle of our assumptions. We're sitting down in the middle of the persons that we are. And as I said, we cannot be otherwise than as we are, but we can understand ourselves as we are without being blinded by ourselves and spun around and around and around by ourselves in a million ways. When we sit in zazen, we are marinating in our feelings and thoughts and unexamined assumptions. And just by virtue of our sitting, we are surrounding them with space and with silence. Allowing these things rather than believing them.

[26:12]

Feeling our way through them rather than grasping them. And maybe, maybe for a moment, seeing through them completely. and feeling a moment of liberation. And this is why sitting practice can be such a tremendous relief from our anxiety. I don't think it's that we calm down. I don't think it's that we have insights that help us find solutions to our problems, inside or out. When we're truly sitting, we will be in a process that is going to make us feel our human problems differently. We are going to be grounded in our human problems in a very, very different way. So my excuse is that I've spent my whole adult life in full-time Zen practice, which excuses me

[27:26]

to say that I'm absolutely convinced that our human future depends on our authentic and committed spiritual practice. Of course, I would say this. You can count on me to say this. But also, by the way, I really believe it's true. Because I think our contemporary human problems really have come from the arrogance of our modern selves. It's not a good thing. And it's not a sustainable thing to have torn ourselves apart from nature and the world around us and from one another. We have to find our way back. When I was a young man, I was just thinking about this the other day, with disbelief that I was the same person then that I am now.

[28:29]

I'm not sure actually it's true. But when I was a young man, I was a Marxist because I was convinced that collective action and collective identity was the only way. But I'm not a Marxist anymore because practicing Zen showed me that it's not enough to believe in love and connection, to think about love and connection, even to work for love and connection. You have to feel it. You have to be immersed in it at the bottom of who you are, in your very presence, in your skin and your flesh and blood and marrow, in your heart, in every word and gesture. I don't mean that sitting zazen is going to save the world. No, the world is not going to be saved. Or, another way of saying the same thing, the world saves itself.

[29:32]

And we are human beings. And we're here for a reason. You're here for a reason. I'm here for a reason. We have to do our best. to practice generosity, ethical conduct, forbearance, joyful effort, meditation, and the wisdom that sees beyond desire and attachment and notions to the truth of how things are. Who knows what the future will bring? Could bad things happen? Oh yeah, really bad things could happen. Could good things happen? Yes, good things could happen and will happen. In fact, I think we could bet on this. Bad things and good things will happen. And maybe bad things cause the good things, or good things cause the bad things. I don't know. Round and round and round the world turns. Who knows? Who knows, even, if the future is anything more than a quirk of our human minds, a trick that has been built into us for some

[30:46]

unknown reason. Not knowing is most intimate. What a great teaching. Practice it if you can. Whenever you think about the future, about what's going on today, about yourself, about your friends, about the world, think it. Of course you can't help but think it. But don't believe it. entirely. Take a breath and remember that everyday mind has nothing to do with knowing or not knowing. Things just are, they come and go. Being good, doing good, benefiting others, loving yourself and everyone else. This is clear. we're going to be all right no matter what happens we are ready for whatever will come and we can act with all our heart and with all our might for the good and that's what we have to do as best as we can understand it so now at the end of my talk i offer a my

[32:14]

coronavirus poems, which a guy in Wuhan, China, emailed me the other day and said, I'm doing an anthology of coronavirus poems. Would you send some coronavirus poems? So I wrote some coronavirus poems. So I'm offering them to you as a kind of bedtime story here at the end of my talk. These were written yesterday. this disconcerting monologue bearing weight in each direction hearing words heaving heaving wood aloft fill the air with force quiet in the quiet spaces a little virus that is and isn't goes in proper sharing puts the people in their places.

[33:16]

Charts, graphs, numbers. We're singing on porches. Applause for people singing on porches. Their joy. Gathering in airports in the rain. The elderly must rest in place. See pictures of places that are not those places. As much as anyone would want to know. for the modern self there are large numbers such harm as we could project take care to withhold embraces the man with the hat an ink-washed mountain high up in Chinese air little farmer in foreground pulls little ox who does not want to go Are the children near?

[34:18]

Are the children ready? Big spaces, no ink. All that helps. All that helps. Whole past in time's sweet kernel of a tiny virus stopping the swirling cloud, dissolving many crowds, closing bars and stores. The white bear falls away and out of view, His species all but shuddered, seen through a human window. Trials and tribulations, food to eat, then sleep. Scrub J pokes for food in grass. Purple finch bobs and weaves on bush like a boxer whose orange face does the steeplejack see. in the mirror of destiny.

[35:18]

It all hardly matters. A god arrives, striped and singing, loose according to pirouettes and panjandrums. A little virus eludes them so mighty in its simple strength. Pinch him, he will bleed. There's no end to his mercy. We were out walking, on pavement and on dirt, landscape, hillside brush, pieces of persons pigeonholed by prearrangement otherwise predicted. This is you, because of sky. A tiny virus, Anyone's lover, peaceful and simple, good as gold.

[36:22]

The night is fallen all around us like a hat. And we're so quiet, we can die in peace. A tall tree separates one from the one on the other side of the innocent virus. We schedule holidays, hushed. within the sacred forests of time. This silent poem barely speaks at night in a lonely home at the top of lamps. But the desert sky is dark and full of tweeting stars. The hearts beat and care. about the others they are oneself as far as substance provides food for the invalids and preachers who visit for succor highly people nurse one another now in tempted times for a little eater virus

[37:48]

knows its lightness follows threads of fragrant hair and lips and teeth its duty veils across the avenues tonight no one levels the streets but breathing understands So let's just close with the four vows. We'll go right into that. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it.

[38:52]

Thank you everybody for listening. And now if I understand this correctly, Joshin is going to figure out how to create interaction. So we're going to be able to have some dialogue. So I think he sent you a message, right? That says how you do this. And then I guess he'll send me a message when there's someone who's raised their hand, and I'm going to call on somebody. Yeah. So... We don't know if anybody, maybe nobody has any questions or comments. One could wonder more than one usually does whether this has all been an illusion and there's no one there.

[39:59]

You could always wonder that even if there are people around, but no, more than usual. No one, it says here, no one is raising hands. Now two participants raised their hands. So I'm going to call on Barbara and hope that Barbara can speak and I can hear her and everybody can hear Barbara. So will you speak, Barbara? I feel very choked up. It's hard to speak. The only reason I'm speaking is to say, Lo bows to you, Norman Fisher. You are magnificent. I, of course, don't mean that personally. Thank you. Good, good, good.

[41:00]

That's pretty good. Barbara, that's awfully sweet of you. Thank you. And I don't know. Mark just asked me yesterday to make a talk. And so I only can talk about what I happen to be thinking about at the time in the hopes that it's a benefit. And so hopefully... It was of some benefit to you. So thank you for your emotion, the emotion I hear in your voice, although I can't see your face. Thank you so much. So next is Cynthia, Cynthia Schrager. Hi, Cynthia. What do you want to say? I just felt bad that no one was raising their hands. Right, right. I guess I've been thinking a lot about the fact that this little virus is... showing us how connected we all are across this entire world that we live in. And at the very same moment that we're in this intense way being shown how interconnected we are, we're also being asked to physically distance ourselves from each other.

[42:09]

And I just was wondering if you have anything to say about that. Yeah. Yes, it is. I hadn't thought about that exactly, but isn't that wonderful? Yeah. Well, right. So isn't there an old saying, absence makes the heart grow fonder? Isn't there a saying like that? That makes sense, right? When you don't see somebody, you realize how much you miss them and how much you need them. So yeah, maybe our so-called social distancing will make us realize how much we need one another. And I think already things are happening like what we're doing tonight, ways that we're... We are reaching out to each other and staying in contact with each other. I've been telling friends that our sons, who usually are so busy with their families and their lives that we can never get their attention, are now calling my wife Kathy and I every day. Every day we're talking to our sons because they, yeah, Kathy and I are older and we're at risk.

[43:13]

So they've been calling us. urging us to be very, very careful and not go out, not do anything. And then they're not gushing about how much they love us, but probably they're calling us every day because this makes us realize how much we care about each other. And also in our case, they live 3000 miles away and we were not far away because we knew we were only an airplane ride away. But at the moment, there's no airplanes. And who knows whether there will be airplanes. There shouldn't really be airplanes. You know, we shouldn't be seeing our families who live 3,000 miles away. It's ridiculous. But now that we can't see them, they're reaching out to us more and thinking about us more, I guess. And so I think we're all doing that collectively. You know, what's interesting is what's going on right now is, of course, and it can't last forever or even probably for very long.

[44:15]

And maybe when it's over, we all just shrug our shoulders and go on with life as if it never happened. But that never is like that, right? Everything changes us. So this is going to change us. And perhaps it'll change us in important ways because I've been quite upset, actually, about how We keep pumping more carbon into the atmosphere. And even as we say, oh, that's bad, that's bad. We shouldn't do that. We've been continuing to do it at a great rate. Well, now we're not pumping so much carbon into the atmosphere. I think carbon emissions have gone way down in the last couple of weeks. So who knows? But what this event, however long it lasts, we'll have all sorts of inner and outer implications for us going forward. So yeah, it's really something, isn't it?

[45:18]

But I miss my friends at Dharma Seminar, you know? I miss seeing everybody every week. And I'm glad that we have. Thanks to the Zen Center for having the wherewithal and the personnel to make this happen so we can still be in touch. I can't see everybody, right? I wish I could see all of you. I wish I could feel your presence in the room. Margot Frank, you raised your hand, so I call on you next. Thank you, Norman. I was so taken by the story you told at the beginning of your book, The World Could Be Otherwise. I repeated it many, many times. It's a dumb story, isn't it? Yeah. And so I'm wondering if there's anything you might say tonight to tie that peace with this moment that we're in now? Because I feel the way I can be held by that story and also the way it's hard to do that.

[46:20]

Well, I'm not going to tell the story. Again, you know the story. Anyway, some of the other people have read the book, and if they didn't, I don't want to tell the story. You can read it in the book. But the thing about that story is that here's a person in a dire situation who refuses to let the conceptual framework of that situation rule his heart. He uses his imagination to live in another world than the world that's presented to him. And because of that, he's able to effect a kind of miracle. So I think that's what we're talking about now, just the same. We are also now living in a very dark, objectively, our situation is very dark, not only with the virus, but beyond the virus, we have many, many real bad human problems, I think. And we will have other viruses.

[47:27]

We need a world in which we know how to be... handle this better than we've handled it this time as well as our other problems so we need to have imagination that goes beyond the arrangements we think are the only possible arrangements to see new arrangements and new ways of being together new ways of living together we really need that much daring and that much vision and that much imagination and i'm what i've said tonight in my talk is that i think that through our spiritual practice that we can share together. And there's lots of ways. I'm not saying everybody has to do zaza. There's lots of ways of accessing the same aspect of the human heart. That's a part of what we need because that's what's going to give us the imagination and the love. And these go together, right? Love and imagination to get through. And I think we will. I think we will. So maybe that's a way of connecting those. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Nice to see you. I can see you. The other people, for some reason, I didn't get a picture of them, but I can see you.

[48:29]

Thanks. Wayne and Paulette. Hi, Wayne and Paulette. I'll talk to you next. Now, Wayne, I have to tell you, it's really hard to hear. I'm actually not able to make out your words. I'm sorry. Is there a way to improve your sound? Well, I can barely, barely make out what you're saying. Maybe speak slowly and just to use a few words, maybe I can make it out. And if I can, I'll repeat it so the others can hear. Okay. humble first of all first of all wayne wanted to say hello and thanking the zen center for making this possible

[49:52]

So he's referring to the modern self, and are you talking about your take on the modern self or my take on the modern self? I didn't catch that. I'm asking about whether the modern self skandas are the same as the pre-modern self skandas. That's a wonderful, if I got this right, you said you wondered if the modern self skandas are the same as the ancient or pre-modern self, Skanda. Is that what you said? That's what I'm going to ask. Yeah, yeah. Isn't that a great question? Only a great Buddhist would ask that question. That's a great question. Of course, don't you think, Wayne, that it must be true, right? There must be something, while the modern self and the ancient self are very different in some very important ways, they also must be the same in some very important ways too, right?

[50:57]

And maybe the skandhas would be a way of defining how the ancient self and the modern self are just being human in the same way. Would you say that? I'm missing almost all that. I'm sorry. We may have to leave it at that, Wayne, because I think it's hard for people to... It's hard. We're not hearing much. So anyways, thank you very much for being here, and it's wonderful to hear your voice and practice together for a moment. Thank you. Bye. Bye, Paulette. Goodbye. I see Terry Baum raising his hand. Maybe I can unmute you. Terry, you're now unmuted.

[51:57]

Okay, thank you. I can hear you, Terry. Okay, good. I can see you too. Okay, great. So I was wondering, you talked about the world somehow. There's one part that I didn't understand when you talked about the world. creating our internal self. Yeah. I don't understand. I think I said that. It was sort of like half a joke and half true when I said that when we disenchanted the world and tamed the world to suit our needs, maybe for revenge, the world stuck our subconscious into our psyches as a form of revenge. That was a kind of a joke. But at the same time, maybe it's true. You know, maybe, maybe, you know, like when we were, we were like Joanna Macy has this great idea, the world as lover, you know, when maybe when the world was our lover and we were the lover of the world, we didn't have so many...

[53:12]

psychological issues or problems. And maybe now that we don't have the world anymore as a lover, now that we're like in peril of trashing the world, we have a lot more inner problems. We have a lot more despair and a lot more craziness and confusion, something like that. Maybe those two things somehow go together. Something like that is what I was... I think I'm getting it, that it's sort of an inevitable result of us separating ourselves from the world, this internal thing. We get further and further. Yeah, and we're not so happy with our internal lives, right? I mean, we have a lot of problems with our internal lives. Many of us do. Yeah, many of us do. Yeah. Well, I think that Joshin is telling me, that it's probably time to stop. What time is it? We've been on together for about an hour. So, yeah, I think it's time to stop.

[54:13]

Am I right? I think we have time for one more question. Okay, all right. One more question. Final question. Okay. And Nancy, you're unmuted now. Okay. Can you hear me, Norman? I can, Nancy. Oh, hi, Nancy. How are you? Hi, Norman. I'm well. Nice to see you. So nice to hear your voice. Thank you so much for having all of us here for speaking with us tonight. I don't want to put you on the spot, but I was wondering. That's always a bad introduction. I don't want to put you on the spot, but, but okay, go ahead. Okay. Oh, I was wondering if we might be able, or you might be able to chant the refuges in Polly for us to close. Oh, sure. Sure, I'd be happy to do that. I don't know if it would be a huge mess for all of us to unmute and do that together. Joshin would make that call probably. But maybe just if you wanted to... Even if we didn't unmute, even if everybody chanted at home, we could chant together in that way, even if we couldn't hear it all.

[55:23]

Okay. So maybe... Let's conclude with that, right? Yeah, so maybe before... Let's have the chanting be the close. So just want to thank Norman. Thank you so much. I loved how you said, oh, you'll just find a few words for tonight, you know, from some old talk. And then clearly you, this is wonderful, your remarks. And thank you everyone for joining us and come. check out Zen centers. We're now doing early morning online sits and Wednesday evening and Saturday lectures. And Susan and I are cooking up a three-day seshin. Oh, that's great. Next Thursday, Friday, Saturday that I think we're going to open up to. Oh, that's great. That's great. Yes, I think Zen center is doing a great job of this and other centers around the country.

[56:26]

are doing this so that people from everywhere, I think, can participate in Zen practice. Since there's nothing else to do, might as well, right? Good idea. So thanks for doing that. All participants, I heard a certain amount of cacophony. So now I guess we'll end, right? Is that right? Yes. Let's chant the refuges. Thank you. . [...]

[57:53]

Saranam Gacchami Tati Amdi Madang Saranam Gacchami Tati Amdi Dhammam Saranam Gacchami Thank you. Good night, everybody.

[58:50]

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