This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome to the San Francisco Zen Center, Beginner's Mind Temple, Groundhog Day. I want to begin with a story that probably some of you have heard, it's a story about three bricklayers. And these three bricklayers are working away. A person goes up to the first bricklayer and asks, what are you doing? And he or she responds, I'm laying bricks one at a time. A person goes up to the second bricklayer bricklayer and says, what are you doing?

[01:00]

And he says, I'm making a living. I'm supporting my family by putting these bricks in. And the person goes up to the third bricklayer and says, what are you doing? And the third bricklayer says, I'm building a temple. I'm helping people connect with God. And this is a story that I've heard many times. And usually it's told in such a way as though we're supposed to be doing what the third bricklayer is doing. This is supposed to be the best and noble activity. But I've been thinking about this story and writing about this story, and I realize if I were overseeing this project, I wouldn't be so happy with people thinking about God while they were laying bricks. Or I wouldn't be so happy... that they were thinking about how they're going to support themselves. I want my bricklayers paying attention to what they're doing and noticing, like, is every brick in the right place?

[02:08]

And are they working well with other people? But then even thinking more about this story, I realized that these are people. These are human beings. And actually, by... We all have to support our families. We have to make a living in some way. And we all want to connect with God or some higher purpose. And the more we can be inspired by that, the better we'll be at bricklayers. And we all have to pay attention to how we're laying these bricks. So what I've come to is that what we need to do is be all of those three bricklayers at the same time. And that this is, I think, I use this to talk about our own lives. That at any one time, we're all three of these bricklayers, not just one.

[03:13]

And I think this was in part a aha that I had many, many years ago I lived here at the San Francisco Zen Center here in Green Gulch and Tassajara for 10 years. And it was the aha that I had in my 10th year when I was director of Tassajara was seeing that there's no conflict in being those people. each of those three bricklayers at the same time. And in a way, I can look at Zen stories and Zen teachings through the same lens. So there's a famous Zen story where a student enters the monastery and says, please give me the teaching. And the teacher says, have you eaten your breakfast?

[04:15]

The student says, no. And the teacher responds, go wash your bowl. I'm sorry, I got that story completely wrong. You know, one of the things that I teach is I failed. Let's try that again. This is really a Zen story, right? They didn't, no, I like that. No, I didn't eat breakfast. Good, go wash your bowl. The actual story is that, have you eaten your breakfast? Yes. Then please go wash your bowl. And in some way, it's the same. I think it's a lot like the three bricklayers story, that we live on many different levels at the same time. I want the teaching.

[05:17]

Oh, well, I want the teaching. I want to connect with God. I want to connect with my true self. Well, great. Then go lay bricks. Go pay attention. Just go pay attention. Learn from that. And that that's how you'll learn to connect. That's how you'll learn to see that our lives are limitlessly deep. So I think this, to me, is the real teaching of the bricklayer story and the teaching of this wash your bowl. seeing how our lives are limitlessly deep, are paradoxical, are unexplainable. Again, part of my own story was that I realized after I had this aha experience being director of Tassahara,

[06:19]

and I was trying to figure out what to do and how to bring practice into the world, I decided naturally to go to business school. And I also needed to support myself while I was going to school. And I can remember that time. I went to business school in New York City, and this was in the mid-'80s. in the mid-80s, and I was going around to different companies trying to get a job. And my resume said that I had been a director of a Zen monastery. And I was really surprised this did not open doors. In fact, hardly anyone wanted to even see me. And so little by little, I started revising my resume. And it got... At one point it said I was the head of human resources at a resort.

[07:24]

I thought this was the truth. Tassar is a resort in the summertime. And I distinctly remember interviewing in a place in Manhattan with this particular resume. And the woman looked up at me and said, who are you kidding? I've been to Tassajara. And she said, and I'm going to hire you because I trust Zen students. And it's funny, you know, I hadn't thought of that in a long time, many years. And how I think the world has changed. that the world has changed, we've all changed, I've changed, that now I get introduced at Google to Google engineers as this is someone who lived at a Zen monastery.

[08:31]

And that people at Google and places in the business world are more and more open and interested to how to bring practice, how to bring contemplative practice into their world. which is pretty, I think, pretty extraordinary. So the question, I think the real question about looking at these stories, whether we look at the bricklayer story or the washable story or my story or all of our stories, I think the question is how do we suffer? How is it that we create our own suffering, and how can we find some sense of freedom? And I think we suffer when we think that we're not good bricklayers or that we think others are more excellent, or maybe we think we're more excellent, that when we're comparing our bricklayer's skill, whatever our particular version is of bricklaying,

[09:41]

And we suffer when this whole issue of making a living is a place of huge suffering for many people, of we're not doing the right thing, or what should we be doing, or if we're practicing, how do we integrate practice with livelihood. And I think we suffer with wanting to be the third bricklayer, thinking, oh, this is the highest and noblest one, the one that is connected with God. And we're never quite able to be as spiritual. We don't have time for spirituality, or we haven't found a way to integrate it in our day-to-day lives. So I think at the center of all of these different kinds of suffering is not accepting and seeing what is. Not accepting and seeing... how paradoxical our lives are and how important it is that we are able to exist and be all three bricklayers at the same time.

[10:48]

Zen takes both a simple and radical approach to how to do this and how to relieve our own suffering. The simple approach, Zen practice says, just sit. Just notice your body. Notice your feelings. Notice your mind. Pay attention and be compassionate. Just practice in this way. And at the same time, it also takes a radical approach and talks about consciousness and even our own consciousness as being a habit, or seeing that everything is a creation of our consciousness. And in some of the most basic Zen texts, it talks about consciousness as a projection. And I think we can kind of intellectually get some sense of that, but Zen practice goes deeper and says, how do we live it?

[12:02]

How do we actually embody both of these, the simple direct way of having a day-to-day practice. And I think this experience that our lives are limitlessly deep. How do we experience this sense of impermanence? So part of what is this topic of accepting what is is seeing that everything is always changing. and seeing that all our ideas about self and some idea of limited self. So this three bricklayer story is like, oh, which self am I? We feel like we need to be one of these selves. We need to, oh, we should just be doing what we're doing, right? Oh, no, we need to be making a living, right? Oh, we need to be doing something that is more spiritual, more connected to some higher...

[13:05]

something outside of ourselves? And the answer is yes. Yes, we need to be doing all of those things, I think, in all of our activities. And so how do we do this? Well, this is all great ideas. How do we do this? Well, this is where practice comes in. This is where meditation practice, where zazen. Zazen, in a way, is the practice of being all of who we are, all completely at the same time, and actually doing this with each breath. One way that I think of it is with each inhale to get a sense. Who am I? What am I? What am I feeling? To be very aware. And then with each exhale to let it all go. There's a... a very famous Zen quote, right?

[14:07]

To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to awaken. And I kind of integrated and played with and stole this idea to write a book called Know Yourself, Forget Yourself. Know Yourself, Forget Yourself. And I think in a way, The bricklayer story and the wash your bowl story are stories about how can we know ourselves and how can we forget ourselves. And by forgetting ourselves, what I mean by that is how do we not get caught by smaller versions that we have of ourselves, not get caught by these questions. Like I know one of the, there's a practice period happening here at the city center. looking at, I think, these questions about what does it mean to be a layperson?

[15:08]

What does it mean to practice while we live in the world? What does it mean to be a priest? And I think I sit here as, I think, the epitome of complete confusion about all of these things. And at the same time, I don't feel confused about it. I feel like I've chosen... I've chosen to wear priest's clothing, and yet I very much live the life of a lay person. And I think many people choose to be lay people and maybe choose to, at times, live monastic lives or live more priestly lives. And there's this wonderful interplay of these labels and practices. And Suzuki Rishi used to say that we're not quite priests were not quite lay people. I think what's important is that we find a way to practice sincerely, and we'll figure out what clothing to wear.

[16:14]

For me, I was surprised. One morning, I woke up and I thought, I didn't feel comfortable wearing layperson's clothing, that I was really drawn to try on priest clothing and to see what what that was like and how that feels. That was, for me, about 10 years ago. And I continue to try on that clothing while I live very much a lay life. Yes, Suzuki Roshi also said, someone once asked him, why do we practice? And he said, so we can be happy in our old age. And I think... This practice of seeing from many different perspectives, this practice of seeing what is, is a way that we can deal with being a human being. That being a human being is a tough gig.

[17:19]

It's really a tough gig being a human being, knowing that the people around us will die, we will die, we will get... We're getting older. It can be shocking sometimes to look in the mirror and see that change happens. But I think it's the same lessons that are in the bricklayer story also apply to time. Even though our bodies may be older, I think we also... We feel young. We feel ageless. Maybe we're young and we feel old. Then I think we're also young, medium, old. We're all of these at the same time. We don't need to get stuck in some particular identity around time. When we're healthy, we know that we're going to be sick at some point.

[18:24]

And when we're feeling sick, we know that at some point, most of the time, we're going to get healthy. That there's this acceptance of what is, is seeing that at any one time, it's embracing this wider sense of life and death. And even life and death itself, there's this wonderful image that Suzuki Roshi tells. It's a story in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind about the waterfall, where he describes seeing, looking at Yosemite Falls and watching the water from the top of the mountain fall off the cliff. And he notices that at that moment, the water is, you can see the individual droplets until the water goes back to the bottom of the stream and goes back to the bottom of the cliff and goes into the stream. And he uses that as a metaphor for life and death, that our life is that short period of time as the droplets falling off of Yosemite Falls are separate.

[19:38]

They're part of the stream before, part of the stream after our brief lifetime. One of the things I've been doing more and more is working at bringing these practices into the world of work, as I mentioned. And I recently took on a new role for me, which is I'm now the CEO of Silly. And my partner is Google's Jolly Goodfellow. It's really fun saying that, being CEO of Silly. And Silly actually stands for the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. So S-I-Y-L-I. And it is based on some work that I've been working inside of Google for the past five years to help develop a program called Search Inside Yourself, which is a

[20:51]

program that combines leadership, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and is rooted in science. And it's interesting. I noticed at first when I heard and started reading about emotional intelligence, I found it kind of a stodgy idea and an idea that I didn't resonate with until I realized that actually Zen practice is the practice of emotional intelligence. That what else do we have to work with other than our emotional lives? And that I thought it was pretty brilliant that my friend Meng down at Google had this idea and this aha that what emotional intelligence was calling Self-awareness is the same thing as mindfulness practice, which is rooted in meditation practice, zazen practice, right?

[22:00]

Actually practicing complete acceptance, practicing living in the moment, noticing how often our minds go to worrying about the future or ruminating about the past and being in the moment. I just saw, I was looking this morning what kind of science to mention, and I noticed a study this morning that I hadn't seen before that I thought was really interesting. It was a study from Harvard that's labeled a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. And this study, again, I just saw this this morning. I don't have, I can... find the details, but it says that the average person or the people that they studied, their mind is wandering 47% of the time. So 47% of time, no matter where you are, even at work or at home, mind wandering is happening.

[23:07]

And that the conclusion of the study was that what people think about is a better predictor of happiness than what people are doing. that what people think about. I thought that was pretty astounding. And I need to do some more research into that particular study. But Zazen practice is being able to train one's mind so that you can both intentionally have the mind wander. In fact, there's other studies that show that mind wandering is good for creativity. That being able... to let one's mind wander, which is different, I think, than worrying and ruminating and planning. It's the kind of mind wandering that I think is practiced in meditation, in zazen. So it's the practice of constantly bringing our mind back to the breath, to the body, and being familiar

[24:17]

becoming more and more familiar with how much the mind does wander, and noticing, becoming familiar and comfortable with kind of open awareness, and then being able to practice a more concentrated and focused awareness. Also, an interesting study showing that just labeling our emotions leads to more peace, and a peaceful state of mind and happiness. That as we spend time labeling our emotions as they arise, it decreases the reactivity in the part of our brain, the emotional part of the brain called the amygdala. And it also, mindfulness practice seems to engage the higher functioning parts of the brain that are able to calm the more reactive emotional parts of the brain. I was watching, I think sometimes I'm a glutton for punishment in that I read the newspaper and I watch the news.

[25:27]

And I was watching last night people being interviewed. This was on PBS News last night. They were interviewing Palestinians and Israelis. And it was shocking and sad how completely caught everyone was by their particular emotional view of things. The feeling of fear, feeling of distrust, and the lack of ability to see things from other perspectives. And there's all kinds of interesting studies showing that mindfulness practice, mindfulness meditation practice has an impact in being able to widen one's perspective. So there's many, you know, there's I think there's many compelling reasons. It's funny. I think one of the things I've always loved about Zen practice, and particularly about the San Francisco Zen Center, is I've never felt there was any proselytizing in any way.

[26:35]

And as I'm saying these things, am I proselytizing? I'm making a case. Well, I'm making a case for the importance of mindfulness meditation practice. Please come here and do it, but do it anywhere you want. It doesn't matter where you do it. I loved that when I walked in the building here for the first time, I just, people were, sometimes people get accused of being unfriendly here. I think that's changing. I think with Christina and Rosalie and others and Blanche that there's, I think it's a much, it's becoming a more and more friendlier place without it being proselytizing in any way. I really appreciated that when I walked in the door, people were present and warm. I loved, too, the combination, like this morning, the smell of incense, and I can smell food, too. But something about the quality of people's presence really drew me to practice.

[27:39]

I think it's a really interesting question to ask about which of these bricklayers are you? And there's probably many other kinds of categories that we all have when we look at who we are and how we get caught by kind of limited identities that we have of ourselves. And then there's something about the spirit of meditation, the spirit of zazen, the spirit of mindfulness, of knowing ourselves and forgetting ourselves, of really understanding our own emotional lives, and being able to find freedom by letting go of the places where we get caught, the limited ideas that we have about ourselves. The limited and constricting. So noticing when we constrict and being able to widen and let it go.

[28:49]

Constricting, letting it go, opening, widening. I think I want to try something. I think I want to have you guys talk. So let's try something. So, without saying anything yet, if we can silently, can everyone just turn to someone? Just find someone? Without saying anything yet, just find a person. So, I want to suggest that you, after I give these instructions, feel free to introduce yourself to this person. Just your name. You don't have to tell your life story. And just briefly, maybe just briefly talk about some, just name some change, some life change that you are in the midst of now.

[30:05]

If you're not in any change, you aren't alive. But see if you could, but just name. just name some change that you're in the midst of, and then very briefly touch on how might accepting what is help you move through that particular change. So we're going to do this in a very brief, you know, this is a lifetime, you know, we could, so just, so just, just let, just without, without overthinking it, without trying to solve it in this moment, we're just going to do like a, we'll do this for a total of five minutes. So each person is just going to, and I don't think, I'm not even going to time it per person. So make sure both people get a chance to speak. But I also want to say, see if you can notice that sometimes you're speaking.

[31:08]

and sometimes you're listening. Notice your own resistance even to doing this, perhaps. You came here to listen to someone, and I'm making you talk, or whatever conversation you're having with yourself now. Notice that, and let it go. Notice, let go, and see if you can just have this conversation. Just mention a life change, whatever occurs to you, and one sentence or two about how might accepting what is, whatever that means to you in this moment, in whatever way I'm talking about it or whatever way you think of it, how might accepting what is help you move through more effectively, meet more effectively this change that you just claimed? Okay? One other thing. Keep voices down. If everyone speaks loudly, this room will erupt in sound and everyone will have to yell.

[32:10]

So get close. Speak softly, just softly enough so the person can hear you. Go ahead. That's a great realization. Even if it's complicated, you don't want to... be there, whatever. Yes? Actually, I've been joking recently. I'm forming a group called Buddhists Against Change. It is good, but it's hard. It can be hard. Well, and And the more we resist it.

[33:11]

For me, I wake up and my children don't live with me anymore. And it's like, where'd they go? How'd that happen? Or I get up and I feel some aches and pains in my legs that weren't there. But I was just telling my partner that I also really appreciate that I can walk. I don't take walking for granted. I've been recently, not all the time, but I think a lot of the time, I'm now a part of the limping club, which I've really noticed is a really big club. And yeah, there's the limping club, there's the people, there's the walking and running, there's the wheelchair club. I mean, there's many different groups that are all working to accept what is. Yeah. Last one, and then we have to finish up. What I may consider to be problems are actually a good opportunity to practice.

[34:19]

Yes. Although, you know, when I lived at Zen Center, there was an ongoing sort of sub-joke that was whenever something bad happened, it's good for your practice. But it's true. It's actually true. It is... change is good. I mean, change is what is. Not only is it good for your practice, it is practice. So I want to just finish with a poem by Ryokan, who was a Zen guy from the late 1700s, early 1800s, who kind of trained in the Zen tradition and was known to be kind of a wandering, homeless monk, calligrapher, poet. What was right yesterday is wrong today. In what is right today, how do you know it was not wrong yesterday?

[35:20]

There is no right or wrong, no predicting gain or loss. Unable to change their tune, Those who are foolish glue down bridges of a lute. Those who are wise get to the source, but keep wandering about for long. Only when you are neither wise nor foolish can you be called one who has attained the way. What was right yesterday is wrong today. In what is right today, how do you know it was not wrong yesterday? There is no right or wrong, no predicting gain or loss. Unable to change their tune, those who are foolish glue down bridges of a loot. Those who are wise get to the source, but keep wandering about for long. Only when you are neither wise nor foolish can you be called one who has attained the way.

[36:27]

Thank you very much. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[36:53]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.43