Special welcome to you. I'm also here for the first time on a Saturday in this spot. So I'm a little nervous. I would like to talk about our different ways of experience in time. You probably all remember where we were and how we felt when we saw the World Trade Center come up on 9-11 by 2001. There are particular moments in our life that have a quality of open-endedness, of moments that can't be finished. They seem to be like a permanent imprint some kind of deeper cut into the identity layers.

[01:05]

They regularly visit us, we come and go, as some kind of staples of our memory storage system. They have a certain quality of presence now, like brilliantly clear footage, sentences like cut and stone. They have sorrowness to them, probably because of the way they were born. They were born in a moment of utterly attentiveness, of complete alertness. And we have a way of recognizing a moment like that on a kind of deeper level.

[02:11]

We are able to know this kind of event on a level of immediacy. It is part of our survival kit that we become completely alert when a fact like that happens. So this is... This recognition is part of our ability to correlate our knowledge of different times and places before we could put it into sentences. In such a moment, we usually can't tell a story yet. The storytelling comes up just a moment later when we start to try to rebalance and integrate the unexpectedness of what just happened.

[03:13]

You could maybe compare it to an earthquake. We lost the ground. There is a moment when we cannot stand on nothing. So this is one way of an idea of presence. Another idea or another description that I would like to bring up is in a poem of the Polish poet Islava Szymborska. And it goes like this. Performance without rehearsal. I know nothing of the role I play. I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it. I have to guess on the spot just what this play is all about. Be prepared for the privilege of living.

[04:18]

I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands. I improvise, although I loathe improvisation. I trip at every step over my own ignorance. I can't conceal my hasty manners. Words and impulses you can't take back. Stars, you'll never get counted. Your character, like a raincoat, you button on the run. The pitiful results of all this unexpectedness. Your character like a raincoat, your button on the run. The pitiful results of all this unexpectedness. No rehearsal for this life. Completely unique. It is not repeated. We certainly come up with our ideas of who we are and who we would like to be.

[05:27]

And we tell stories of our lives to others and most frequently to ourselves. We try to establish who we think we are. We try to prepare for the moment. We dress in a certain way and we spit out certain phrases. We entertain our dream. our movie of what you think, who we are. And it seems to us that we have no choices, and we also have choices. Our character, like a raincoat buttoned on the run, is not actually our free will invention. It comes together through the many layers of scripts of the worlds that we live in.

[06:31]

It comes together as an intersection in the weave that connects us to all life around us. And the weave has countless dimensions. We feel an unexpectedness of life because we are an autopilot. We are mostly just going through the motions of our life, repeating the familiar patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions. Ancient twisted karma of body, speech, and mind. It takes a conscious effort to switch the autopilot to full-scale presence. And we are already here in the midst of our lives.

[07:34]

There is no other time than this time to live. So one of the delusions that promote our state of being on autopilot or dreamlike cruising along is that we think of time as a kind of continuum of past, present, future. We actually have the idea we are born into a stream of time, we stay there for a while, and then we leave the stream again. Our idea of self is tied into our memories, image from the past, and plans for the future. The past and the future seems to easily override the possibility of being present.

[08:35]

Our idea of time also seems to be connected to the way we put our stories and our ideas of who we are into language. Jill Walter Taylor, a brain scientist who experienced a major stroke where her left brain hemisphere was put out of function. She was 37 at the time, and this happened in 96. And it took her about eight years to fully recover. But she did, and she wrote a book about this experience, My Stroke of Insight. And in this book, she writes, instead of having my roles prematurely stunted, they became open-ended, and I felt no rush to do anything.

[09:48]

I shifted from the doing consciousness of my left brain to the being consciousness of my right brain. I morphed from feeling small and isolated to feeling enormous and expansive. I stopped thinking in language and shifted to taking new pictures of what was going on in the present moment. I was not capable of deliberating about past and future related ideas. So I recommend this book because it has very interesting observations that she was probably able to make even in that awful condition that she had to go through because she had a lot of knowledge and a lot of images that appeared to her she could later on relate back to language and tell us what happens and what you go through, particularly in the ways that she describes recovery are very inspiring, I think.

[11:08]

So I think to unwind our permanent draw into the past and the future, is to practice. One understanding of practice in this tradition, in Dogen's tradition, is to completely engage in the moment, to completely do what we are doing right now. Suzuki Roshi describes it as burning like a fire, not burning like a smoky fire. He describes that in beginner's mind under no traces. And I witnessed a great example of what I think was to be completely dancing in the present, completely being attentive during the fire at Tassajara. I was here in the office, in the abbot's office, with a small group of people,

[12:21]

on the 10th of July when we received a call from the director at Tassahara telling us that the fire was coming down now from four sides at the same time. His voice was, he was completely scared. This was, the group in the room fell silent And there was an adrenaline rush seething everybody. It was like, oh God, this is a worst case scenario. Briefly after that, we ended the conversation and we agreed that he would call back like an hour and a half later. So we reconvened in the office and he called again. And his voice had completely changed. At that point, he was kind of in protection, taking care of burning embers at different places at Tassajara.

[13:30]

And there was no fear anymore. It was not that the fire had gone through, that it was done, but it was a very clear message in the way he could speak and tell us what was going on. It was a big relief for all of us. It was just the experience, okay, they're all doing what they can, and there was a relief of the suffering of this enormous fear that had been there before. So just the change of the voice, just this relief, was a very good teaching to look at what happened there. I could continue to think about or to try to understand what it is that makes us completely available.

[14:37]

What it is to become free of holding on to our script, holding on to our idea of who we are. How is it possible to let go of this priority of me? need me? How is it possible to open and live relationships to everybody around us, the ones that we love, the ones that we fear, or the ones that we avoid, the ones that we can't understand? And I think that the Bodhisattva vow give us a great help, a great orientation of how to work with this, how to make us prone to be able to be available to the present.

[15:41]

The Bodhisattva vows are beings are numberless, I vow to save them, delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to enter them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is also possible. I vow to become it. We chant these vows all the time. We chant them actually after each lecture. And they are at the center of all our initiation ceremonies, lay ordination, priest ordination, or wedding ceremony, or funeral. So they are the heart of our kind of ethical, of our intention.

[16:54]

In the first one, I vow to save all beings, sounds like a tall order. It is to engage in liberating beings endlessly. It seems to have some paradoxical element to it, like vowing something that is actually not possible to do, and of course if we think we're doing it, it is not possible. But it's also the only kind of liberation that is possible. As long as our freedom or liberation excludes the freedom of others, it is compromised. So The Bodhisattva vow of saving all beings is personified in Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion.

[18:11]

And Avalokitesvara is often portrayed as a figure with many, many hands and many arms. And the hands are all holding different instruments and tools. to come to help in different situations. There's one of these statues on the second floor in the Dokusan waiting area. There's many different ideas about how many hands Avalokitesvara has, like from a thousand to eighty-four thousand. The Blue Cliff Record, that's a koan collection that was collected in China around the end of the first millennia. There is a koan reflecting on Avalokiteshvara's many hands.

[19:12]

And it has a question, what is it like for the great Bodhisattva of compassion to have so many hands? And the answer is it's like groping in the dark of night for your pillow. So is groping for the pillow where we are kind of sleeping or half asleep is probably a metaphor for like a direct action. direct an action where we don't separate, where we don't do something to an object outside. If we just help ourselves, our body knows what to do, what we need to be comfortable. So it is about being a bodhisattva, being

[20:25]

able to help all beings without doing, without me being here and others being out there that need my help. So can there be a response to suffering in the world that is as simple as the response of grasping the pillow at night where there is no sense of an object of a being of a person out there who is separate from us, taking care of them. The next three bodhisattva vows instruct us on this approach of helping all beings in this immediate sense. The second one is

[21:28]

Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. So this means we need to study how we look at the world. We need to understand what we see and what we don't see. We need to understand how we experience, how we process the world. so that we become able to interrupt the same old patterns of recapturing the world in a certain way and being able to stop our constant being on autopilot. To save all beings, we want to realize that we are not separate.

[22:31]

We want to realize that it is not us saving them. There is not some independent, separate being in charge of the world that I perceive. To work with our habit of thinking of ourselves and others As separate entities with independent inherent selves, we need to study ourselves and become intimate with our gut reaction. Dropping out of the autopilot, dropping the inexhaustible move about us, makes us able to meet whomever we meet openly and fully, confirming that presence in being completely available, stopping thinking.

[23:42]

And when we become immediately available, when our fear of the future and our preconception through memory falls away, we actually can explore what is going on right now. Every situation, including a forest fire, becomes predomagate, a situation of learning, of exploring. And it is a marvelous way to be when the world is just to explore, find out, to discover. We actually have a model student for this kind of exploration here. I think he's not here today. Sebastian is three years old and he demonstrates this most of the time. The fourth vow is Buddha's way is unsurpassable.

[24:58]

I vow to become it. It is a commitment to wake up. It is a vow to become available to understanding the truth. It's a commitment to love all beings around us with a deep wish that everyone wakes up to their incomparable nature. So the Bodhisattva allows, that I just went through very briefly, give us a great structure in training ourselves to be available, bringing our intention and our attention to this life happening right now.

[26:02]

And there's many examples in the Buddhist literature that describe bodhisattvas and great beings manifesting this. And I wanted to bring up one that I particularly like, It's a description of Dogen. It's also in honor of the Slow Food Nation that's happening right now in San Francisco. It's a description of the meeting with a head cook of a monastery. Dogen wrote the instructions for the head cook of the monastery after his trip to China. was in the 12, 23, 25, and he wrote this in 1237 when he was in Japan and actually working on the workings of a monastery that he founded.

[27:24]

And it's very interesting that he not just wrote that instruct us about meditation, but that he also wrote instructions for the head cook, where he actually instructed us about being in action, about being working, or being in the kitchen. So he describes the meeting with this old Tenzel, who is drying mushrooms in the heat of the sun, carrying a double cane with his shaggy eyebrows. He looks like a Christian. Dogen asks him his age, and he says he's 68. And then Dogen asks,

[28:28]

why do you not have an attendant or a lay worker do this task for you? Old Tenzo says, others are not me. Dogen asks, why do you do this now in the heat of the sun? And the Tenzo answers, what time should I wait for? And I think his two answers, Others are not me. And what time should I wait for? Bring it to the point that there is no other life than this life right now. In the Tenzo's action, there's no picking and choosing. He's completely exerting himself. He's completely engaged with what he's doing. He's struggling. He's an old man. He's in the heat.

[29:29]

He's doing his thing. But he's also completely doing it without wanting anything else. So for me, this is like total immersion in the present. Meet the particularity of our karmic life. And it is a delusion to assume that we are an unchanging unit, going through a timeline of past, present and future, and that there might be a better time to be present.

[30:31]

There is no time by itself like that. And there is no unchanging person. Our possibility is to meet this particular moment which includes all times. And it is important to arrive where we are. At this place, it is possible to accept that we are in the same place with everybody in this way. This is one of the most difficult delusions to give up, thinking that we are in charge of our life independently from everybody else. instead of knowing that we are completely interconnected. Dogen says it in this way.

[31:41]

Know that in this way there are myriads of forms and hundreds of grasses throughout the entire earth, and yet each grass and each form itself is the entire earth. The study of this is the beginning of practice. When you are at this place, there's just one grass. There's just one form. There's understanding of form and no understanding of form. There's understanding of grass and no understanding of grass. Since there is nothing but just this moment, the time being is all the time there is. glass being, foam being, at both times. Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Each moment is all being, is the entire world.

[32:47]

Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Each moment. We can use this as a mantra can repeat the sentence and move with it. We hit the bell trying to do something. It might not be easy because we want something. We might want to make a nice sound. We might get carried away by a fascination with some kind of beauty. And we can also sound the bell every day, relax into the bell, and we cannot prepare for being alive, for being connected.

[33:58]

Each moment is all being with their world. How can we enjoy our complete interconnectedness? Do we have the patience to not just be busy? Can we be still and welcome all things? What is this expression of complete exertion? What is this burning like a bonsai? What is leaving no trace of self or thought? So I would like to close with a column one of those moments the great master Basho walking along with Yakuju they see wild ducks flying by Basho asks what is that?

[35:26]

Yakuju replies wild ducks where have they gone? blown away. Basho grabs Yakujo's nose and twists it. Yakujo cries out in pain. Basho says, when was this blown away? Thank you very much.

[35:52]

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