Good morning. This morning, in a way, is like a meeting of worlds. There are many of us, maybe half the room, has spent the last week doing a meditation intensive in Zen style. And then, of course, half of you have just walked in the door bringing whatever your week has created, what consequences your week has created bringing that here until those two worlds meet. And then, of course, the challenge for me is can I say something that applies equally to both of them? Is there some way, some fundamental relationship to our life that applies whatever circumstances we're in, whatever mood we're in, whatever situation we're in?

[01:27]

Is there some fundamental? And certainly Zen practice and the exploration of Zen tries to address that question and produce an answer. In a way, that's what I'd like to try to do too. It's a very interesting process to meditate for a week. It's a very interesting notion. to give yourself over to a prescribed schedule. And for almost everybody, quite a demanding schedule. It challenges you to bring out as much energy and intentionality as you can. It challenges you to...

[02:33]

Make a shift. Make a shift from just acting out who you are, just reacting to what arises, to waking up to who you are. And discovering how to let that information that arises when you wake up, how to let that information guide your life. How can you answer the question, what's important about living a human life, unless you've looked carefully at what's going on and discovered through direct experience what life has to teach? Anyway, that's the thought of Zen.

[03:38]

So when you engage a week-long intensive, it's as if you undo yourself by doing yourself. You sit there watching yourself be yourself. Sometimes utterly caught up in it, like in a dream. And like many dreams, you know, when they're over, you're not quite sure what the heck the dream was about. What did I just do for the last 30 minutes? What was so enticing and intriguing? And slowly, as you keep sitting with it, more of it comes up from the murky waters into awareness. And then that's when it really starts to get interesting.

[04:40]

Psychologically, there's a way in which part of the reason it's done there in the murky waters is because we'd rather not look at it. As the finder of Zen Center said once, don't be sure you want to awaken, you might not like it. This process of undoing yourself by doing yourself. What you discover when you start to pay close attention is to some relentless force about doing yourself, about being yourself, about hearing the sign and giving it a name, car on the street, about having an experience creating a commentary, an understanding, a conclusion, an association.

[05:51]

It's extraordinarily challenging and difficult to be the moment and not do something to it. It's almost as if the very act of doing something to the moment is the act of being alive. And zazen is not a process by which you stop doing. Zazen is a process by which you wake up to doing. And usually, our more usual state of mind is that doing is so alluring, it pulls us in. We get engrossed in the story. We like it, we don't like it. We're frightened. We're delighted.

[06:57]

We're saddened. We're confused. We're disappointed. We're embittered. We're filled with hope. If you just keep watching. The very act of being the person that you are starts to give some clues as to how to be something bigger. The very act of watching how your mind, your attention can fixate on something gives some clues as to how to have a bigger mind, some bigger sense of being. It's as if we start to create an inner space.

[08:01]

Usually when we have experience, especially difficult experience, we contract around it, quite literally. We fixate it in terms of thinking and we contract physically. The Zazen, Zen meditation, is about not contracting. It's can we discover, can we get in touch with how we contract around our emotions, our life, our sense of who we are, our relationships, whatever it is that we conjure up, whatever it is we experience through being alive. Can something stay wide and available and just let it have all the space it needs to do itself?

[09:22]

So in the process of... So each day this week, I've given a talk at this time of day. And so... There's a couple of phrases I've sort of belabored in the service of trying to convey something fundamental. You know, I honestly think that that sense of creating inner space around the experience that we're having, words can't touch it, ideas can't touch it, they can just point this in a certain direction, hold up a certain proposition. So the two phrases I've been using have been, meet it with grandmotherly eyes, soft grandmotherly eyes. Can we meet our own life with a fundamental benevolence?

[10:28]

that's more inclined towards compassion than criticism. And then the other phrase I've been belaboring is magnificent mistake. If you think of the human species, you know, and you think of how, as we, it seems to be from, as best we can figure out. We started in Africa, and then we just kept going. We went out of Africa, and we went all over the globe, and everywhere we went, we did things, we created things, we had wars, we built cities, we chopped down forests, polluted rivers, all sorts of amazing, awful, wonderful, creative things. Yeah. It's like we just can't stop ourselves. It doesn't seem to matter to us that we don't quite know what we're doing or the consequences of it.

[11:43]

We just keep going. Well, that's a good idea. Let's go. And then you sit down and you just watch yourself go. And you get up and you watch yourself go. Magnificent mistake. Yeah, as a species, we've done amazing things. We've done some pretty stupid things, too. You know, you read some parts of history and you think, what were they thinking? How could they have done that? And so Zen practice is about, can that, rather than just upon reflection of a million years or even a thousand years or even one year, can it become more and more real time?

[12:59]

Can you watch it unfold and can you respond to it as it's unfolded. That capacity to be present for, to notice, to have some space around what's happening. And then one of the interesting conclusions Zen practice draws is that to create a sense of intentionality and a sense of structure. So we create structure to discover intrinsic freedom. It's like with formal poetry, you know, in different styles of poetry, you know, in haiku.

[14:01]

It's five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. So you create the structure, and then within this structure, you discover freedom. You discover creativity. It's a similar notion. That when you intend to do it a certain way, that quickens the realization of exactly what's happening. It's as if in our dream, in the dream of the moods, of the imaginings that flood our life, that pull us into their murky waters so that we're sort of aware of what we're doing and sort of not aware of what we're doing.

[15:03]

See, this intentional structure, this doing things in a particular way, asks us to come back to the surface, to see in this moment what exactly is happening. Do it exactly like this and see what's happening. You know, this is part of the flavor of Zen practice. So 60 odd of us have spent the whole week doing that. And it's very curious. I would say almost everybody at some point in the week doesn't want to be doing it. And that's probably the people doing it who are laughing at that. And then by the end of it, almost everybody thinks.

[16:14]

There was something great about that. There was something really great about that. I'm a little bit looser, a little bit lighter, a little bit more capable of being the person I am, of living the life I already have. In a strange way, a little bit more grateful and appreciative. This is being undone by our own doing. This is our very human nature and living it, teaching us how to discover freedom.

[17:16]

And then the question becomes, how do we relate to that unrelenting doing in a way that reveals, that brings forth freedom? So this week I've been talking about a teaching called Tozan's Five Runks. And the first step is don't be so hooked, don't be so caught up in the stories you tell yourself. That's what pulls us into the murky waters of our own dreams. They're not so different from what we do at night when we go to sleep. We go into our dreams.

[18:21]

And in some ways, there's something magnificent about them. This magnificent synthesis of all the minutiae of our daily experience. It gets synthesized. It gets put on a palette. And wonderful images and stories are created. Some genius of our doing, of our creative doing, gets expressed. Every night. Our so-called waking life is actually not that different. We're just doing the same version of the same thing. Except in our waking life, we confuse ourselves by thinking this is real.

[19:28]

No, it's just a magnificent mistake. Truly magnificent. And truly not the only truth in time. It's just aversion. So Deng Shan's first step is recognize that. But please, Don't feel bad about it. Don't start to beat yourself or anyone else up about this. It's a magnificent thing. But now that you've started to see that, please consider looking directly as carefully as you can at what's really going on. Please see if you can see The exactness of the moment.

[20:32]

Sitting here, can you see the quality of light in the room? Can you hear the signs of crooked chairs, occasional cars? Can you feel the sensations in your body? Can you notice what thoughts or images flicker through your mind? What judgments, associations? Can here and now become a touchstone? Can it become a reference point? Can it become a way to bring your consciousness, your awareness up out of the murky waters of the dream? And then as we start to do that, then we can start to explore something very interesting, which is the relationship between what's actually coming in through the data of our senses and what we do to it.

[21:55]

And then we can start to discover And in what we do to it, sometimes we create for ourselves and for others enormous difficulty and pain. And sometimes we create delight and joy and beautiful creative expression. What turns it one way and not the other? How are we relating to our experience that leaves us reactive, embittered, frightened, rather than delighted, optimistic, at ease?

[23:04]

But you know, that's the question we can't really explore until we start to make contact. And in Zen practice, we call that exploration studying the way. process of that study Zen as does Buddhism proposes certain fundamental dispositions this notion of soft grandmotherly eyes can we coach ourselves to meet our world with a sense of benevolence a sense of generosity a sense of patience

[24:12]

Can we coach ourselves to remember that there is a discipline in coming back to the moment of registering what you're thinking, what you're feeling, what you're hearing, what you're seeing? That there's a discipline in how we engage our life. There's a way of engaging our life that supports us to be awake. And there's a way of engaging our life that makes us more asleep. And that this discipline is not about restriction. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's about discovering freedom.

[25:24]

And yet, I think if you asked almost everybody who just spent the last seven days sitting, was there a point where there was an upwelling of reluctance, resistance, hesitancy, despair? pleasure for the structure? I think almost everybody would say, yeah. There was some point where I just didn't want to be doing it. So discovering the inner space, the inner capacity to hold our own reluctance, our own hesitancy, or more fundamentally, our own suffering.

[26:38]

Discovering the capacity to hold it and to meet it with intention. And then for each of us, a mysterious and wonderful workings, what cultivates your intention? How do you arrive at an intention, a truth, that you can say, I can give my life to this. That's how much it means to me. I have a response to that notion. Here's my response to that notion. It's always a work in progress.

[27:40]

If you think you know exactly what it is you can give your life to completely and that it's always going to be that way, I would say watch out. Be careful. I would say use a little pragmatism It's like, okay, right now, here's what seems appropriate. Right now, as best as I can see it, this seems like the thing to do. This is, certainly Zen practice is a learning through doing. You know, how do you learn how to sit through sit? You know, how do you learn how to do Zen practice? By doing Zen practice. And I would say our life is no different. How do you learn how to live? By living. You bring your best to it and see what happens.

[28:42]

And listen and learn and discover. Because in a way, it's all a magnificent mistake. I've read that 80% plus of all the wars we've managed to concoct as humans were in the name of religion. They were all in the name of higher good. They were all our efforts to bring forth the best of our humanness. In fact, transcend our humanness and bring forth something better than it. Well, how embarrassing is that? Or what a cautionary tale that is. But to bring forth our intention as a work in progress.

[29:47]

So strangely enough, in the language of Zen, We talk about this being based on a don't know mind. And what it means is that we don't have a rigid, fixed opinion. What it means is that we have a working definition for what's appropriate. And that we take that and we live it. or we actualize it, we do it, we be it. And then it brings forth whatever it brings forth. In a phrase coined by the finder of San Francisco Zen Center, beginner's mind. And in Dongshan's works, this is the interplay of this amazing dream creative capacity of our human existence.

[31:15]

The marvelous and awful way would constantly, unrelentingly like and dislike, draw conclusions, create associations, imaginings, disappointments. core experiences that prompt them and the way our dreams infuse them with meaning and emotion. From his perspective of Zen practice, this is just fine. How are you going to learn how to be you? By being you. What better teacher could you have? What more appropriate, accurate teacher could you have than being you when you're trying to learn how to be you? When you're trying to discover who you are, what can you learn from better than the very fact that you are being who you are and the experience of it?

[32:28]

This is the proposition of Zen practice. And from that learning, what could teach you more than that learning than how to live a life that suffers less and creates more happiness and contentment? And when it comes down to it, who does not want to do that? Who does not want to suffer less and create more contentment and happiness? This is the fundamental consequence of waking up. Is that we discover how to suffer less and create a way of being, a way of engaging, a way of relating. Where this innate, imaginative, creative genius

[33:37]

becomes an ally rather than an enemy. That instead of investing our energy in reconstructing the things that have hurt us, betrayed us, we can invest it in bringing forth a sense of being. for ourselves and for everyone else that does truly bring out the nobility of our human existence. And in the path of practice of Zen, we call this intention and the expression of it The bodhisattva way.

[34:39]

The way that includes everyone in the process. Even though in a way it's a very individual and personal event and process, in another way it's completely a collective event. More and more we're just simply discovering we're all on this planet together. And we will either destroy it together or not. I mean, maybe this impending doom will turn out to be an enormous blessing. That we have a common concern. Which really is one of the fundamental teachings of all the great religions. We have a common concern. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

[35:41]

So this wish for freedom, this wish for well-being, this wish to marshal the innate genius of our human being in a way that brings forth beauty and contentment. That we do it together. This is the imagery of Zen. And so I'd like to end, for no good reason, by reading this poem. You know, when I was sitting upstairs, concocting my talk, which was not at all what I just said, I thought, I'll have to work this poem, you know? And, you know, I thought, this poem has got to represent Dengshan's five ranks.

[36:50]

But, you know, maybe you can figure it out. I could. But now I'm thinking, the poem is so much fun. I hope you'll agree with that. I think it's worth reading. Last night, as I slept, as I was sleeping, I dreamt, marvelous mistake, that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said, along with secret aqueduct, oh water, are you coming to me? Water of a new life that I have never drunk. Could this day be some turning point in your life? Could this day be some turning point where you forgive, forget, release, whatever it is, whatever the verb is that lets something loose, some burden, sets it down, and that enlivens something formative, constructive, generous, kind.

[38:11]

What catalyst do you need to do that? What magnificent dream would allow that? That would allow this water of a new life that you've never drunk before. Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt. Marvelous mistake. That I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from all my old failures. They weren't just failures. They were magnificent failures. You can learn so much from them. Sometimes we learn so much more from our failures than our successes. You know, often it occurs to me in watching people come to practice. You know, it's very interesting.

[39:15]

In a way to think, who gets the most out of it? Some people come, they're limber, they're strong. They're basically in pretty good psychological shape. They come, they do a little sitting, and they leave. Then some people come, and it seems like every darn part of the practice is hard for them. They're not very good interpersonally. They bring a lot of baggage. Their body just doesn't sit that well. And they've had a hard time in their lives. And they get so much out of it. It's like just having gone through that has created a depth of character. Has created a compassion. Has created... a determination, an intentionality.

[40:15]

What sweet honey can be made from our old failures? Last night as I was dreaming, I dreamt, marvelous mistake, that a fiery sun was giving light inside my heart. It was fiery because I felt its warmth as if from a heart. And sun, because it gave light and brought tears to my eyes. You know, it's a common experience that when we lay down some burden, that when we see through something that's caused us so much pain, is a relief and sometimes that release comes the whole way up and out our eyes sometimes something in our being warms with the energy of release last night as I slept I dreamt marvelous mistake

[41:38]

that it was a magnificent spirit I had here in my heart. Through there, maybe it's a magnificent spirit you have in your heart. Maybe being you isn't such a terrible affliction after all. That you have to subject yourself to Zen torture. To recover from it. To Bernadette. And become something new and improved. Maybe already within you. The waters of a new life. that flow will allow some sweetness, like honey.

[42:52]

And I will let you discover what we all discover when we lay something down. There is a genius in the human spirit. and that awareness can let that shine. Thank you.

[43:24]

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