So good morning, everyone. I feel incredibly grateful for this occasion to talk with you all. Thanks so much for coming. So I did feel that I should offer one disclaimer, though, and it's this. Many of you have probably heard either Blanche's talk or Linda's talk on last Saturday. last Wednesday, and what I wanted to say about them is that if you heard them, you heard all the things that I'm planning on saying as well, but you heard them said much better than I'm actually gonna say. So for those of you who did hear the talks, you can consider this a review session, and for those of you who didn't, just bear in mind that I'm doing my level best or something like that. So that was the disclaimer. So the Buddha said, suffering arises from self-clinging.

[01:10]

And I think we all understand that intuitively, and I think we all, when we hear... someone and recite the Four Noble Truths, we think, ah, yeah. Suffering arises from self-clinging. We all feel it in our gut, right? I thought, though, that I'd dig in a little bit and see what that means, see if we can get to the heart of that a little bit. So when in the classical literature they talk about self-clinging, it's It's this idea of attaching to a notion of a self, attaching to a notion of a person. And obviously we all do that. But there's a number of levels on which we perform this attachment, we enact this attachment.

[02:15]

And it's kind of worthwhile sometimes to go through them. So the first is just the experience of being in the body. So as we all sit here, if you let your proprioceptive sense take in your body, everyone can feel, everyone knows where their legs are. Everyone knows, if you sit quietly, you can feel where your heart is. And, We all experience that as, and there's a good reason for this, we all experience that as this bundle of living tissue and this nexus of energy. And the really good reason for that is that we have to take this body up and walk it around in the world without bumping into things.

[03:20]

We have to do crazy things like drive cars, where the ability of our body to, without being told, do this calculation where you're driving down the road and you see an object coming in from the outside of your visual field, your body and mind, without being asked, without having to pull out a calculator and and do the numbers can figure out whether that object is gonna collide with you or not. And that depends deeply on the notion of a self, and on the physical experience of being this self at this location at this time, and so on and so forth. So there's that. And then, overlaid on top of that, there's something, and I would say that that all beings of sufficient complexity have something like that.

[04:25]

You watch some sort of nature program on TV, if you watch nature programs on TV, and you see a cheetah running 80 miles an hour across the valve, there's something like that going on in that cheetah as well. The next level of it is something that's more especially human, the ability to do complicated planning, right? So we make tremendously complicated plans, and we model the future, and we model ourselves in the future, right? So that also requires a notion of a self and a notion of a person in order to operate. At some level, in our brain, we're imagining this bundle of living tissue, this nexus of energy, in a situation that's something like a situation we've seen, so we can use our memory to reconstruct it, and that's nothing like we've ever seen before.

[05:42]

Very, very complicated, and we make pretty complicated plans. And we can use them to do remarkable things, right? So there's the planning. And then laid over on top of that is this wonderful thing that we learn how to do, which is to talk, right? Or mostly wonderful. The... the ability to use language and think grammatically and the ability for me to make an utterance and for you to understand it is deeply dependent on ideas of who's speaking, you know, the speaker as subject, the speaker as object, the notion of subject and subjectivity and so on. It's...

[06:45]

totally founded in the notion of a self, the notion of a person, the notion of this bundle of living tissue and this nexus of energy, right? And then, as if that weren't enough, there's this wonderful thing that happens. I can remember when my daughter, Deirdre, who's gonna graduate college this month, was two. We were talking on the phone. We did a lot of talking on the phone back then. she said, you know, I just found out today that you can talk to yourself without talking out loud, right? And I was like, whoa. She actually said that. It's remarkable. And I think this is something that every one of us discovers, right? And there's a wonderful collection of theories, some of which may or may not be completely accurate, about the gestures that we make when we're thinking.

[07:55]

Like there's the pose of the thinker, like this, right? And this set of theories claims that what that feels like is stopping the mouth. So that, you know, you think these thoughts, but nothing comes out. And so it's kind of safe. And you can tell yourself stories in private. And we do. We tell ourselves stories in private. And often we model the future, again, as a form of planning, but in a new way, as a kind of retrospective storytelling about what the future is going to be like. Everyone does this. They say, you And then when he or she was done, everyone said, woohoo, that was great. And the thing that's amazing about that is that these stories, this speech engages all of the...

[09:01]

all of this imagined speech, this sub-vocalized speech, engages all of the... engages our whole body, essentially. So it's not only that we're just talking to ourselves, it's that we're talking to ourselves and we feel the results. And there's this kind of interesting feedback loop involved where we tell a story and it causes these feelings and... and those feelings cause us to either tell the same story or moderate the story and tell it again, and it's a continuing process. This wonderful thing happened to me once where I was staying in Mexico and living on the beach in a little palapa, and this isn't the wonderful part yet, and spending all day body surfing and hanging around, and one evening, A bunch of people that were staying on the same beach went into town and bought a fish, and we dug a big hole in the sand and filled it with charcoal and wrapped the fish in banana leaves and covered it up and let it cook for a while.

[10:11]

And then we opened it up, and somebody had some beer, and we sat around. It was this beautiful evening, and this isn't the wonderful part yet. And then at the end of the evening, we all went to bed, and a few days later, Marsha and I, about a week later, Marsha and I came home, and a while after that, we were recovering from the various kinds of adjustments that you make when you're coming back from a long time in a foreign country. And we were sitting together working on something. We were sitting at the computer, and here comes the wonderful part. She looks at me, and she goes, your eyes look like somebody... scribbled on them with yellow highlighter. And it turns out I had hepatitis from eating this lovely fish, which had been caught in the reef waters off the Caribbean Yucatan, which was full of all sorts of stuff, and it gave me hepatitis.

[11:14]

And Marcia didn't get it, because she'd already had it, right? So there's this interesting thing about hepatitis. That was really the good part. So the... Hepatitis is a disease that removes every iota of desire from your body. So the desire to eat? No, there's no desire to eat. It's an effort to put a little bit of food in your mouth and keep it in your stomach long enough for it to nourish you. Your interest in eating is down to zero. Sexual desire? No, no sexual desire. The desire to do anything at all besides just kind of sit around or lie around is completely gone. And you feel kind of feverish and odd and so on. And so I remember lying there, and hour upon hour, and I was sick for, I don't know, six weeks or something like that, watching it go by.

[12:19]

And I noticed, you know, so a thought would arise, and I could feel... in my kind of fever state, the kind of color and flavor and texture of that thought. And I could feel that, you know, ah, there's a kind of reddish, orangey, angry thought, right? There's a kind of blue-green, peaceful thought. And the other thing I noticed after a while is that I go through a chain of thought and I'd run up against something, and I'd back up and do it again. And I think we all have this experience, too, right? It's like we try out something, and if it doesn't pan out, if the emotional tags on that trial get too kind of bothersome, we back up, and we run it again, and we do it a little bit differently.

[13:21]

We try it where... where I say something different in whatever situation I'm imagining. And we do this about the future. We also do it about the past. We reconstruct the past in such a way that, frankly, we won. We're the hero of our own recollected story of the past. It's... It's a remarkable capability, and it's tremendously involving. And so there's that. And then there's this guy, I think his name is Ian Hodder, who's the head of the dig at this Neolithic town called...

[14:24]

I'm not going to pronounce it correctly, but Katolhöyük in Turkey. And he has a book called Katolhöyük, something or other, something like The Leopard's Tale. And it's a fantastic book. And it's mostly fantastic because it's clear that what he does at this place is he just goes through this record of thousands of years of human habitation with a brush, and he brushes... I've done a bad thing, sorry. Well, that's the problem. You can't stop me from waving my hands. I'm sorry. Thank you. So, scraping through this stuff, and he'll find a lentil.

[15:24]

And he'll take and put in this great catalog of lentils, as opposed to a fingernail pairing or something like that. And he does this, and then he kind of sits back and thinks about it. And so most of the book is talking about the kind of day-to-day details of his work. And then he starts saying these things. And what he says is this, which is... This is sort of in his kind of, you know, here's my thesis portion of the book. He says this. He says, if you look at human history from the Paleolithic on, it's this clear, clearly delineated trajectory of increasing entanglement between people and increasing entanglement between people and things. And he doesn't say this, but it's also true. increasing entanglement between people and other beings, like cows, cats, and so on and so forth, right?

[16:29]

And so you overlay that entanglement, that kind of trajectory that we're still on of being ever more engaged and tied up with... our local community of beings and the extended community of beings and with the things that we own and the things that we wished we owned and so on and so forth. And that's kind of conventionally the human condition. That's what people talk about when they say that's the human condition. It's this sense of being a constructed of having a constructed self, having the notion of a self, having the construct of a self that's built out of these narratives that we tell ourselves, and of that being existing in a world where we're tangled up with things and people and other beings.

[17:42]

So what does that feel like? Remember the Buddha said that's what suffering comes from, right? It's that self-clinging, that entanglement, that set of phenomena that we've just been talking about, right? So there's a lot of wonderful language, metaphorical language in the sort of classical Zen literature, the koan collections and so on, that try and get at exactly what this feels like, right? And the kinds of things they say are wonderful. So there are metaphors around being in a field of grasses and kind of hemmed in by grasses and reeds that cling to you. Everyone kind of knows what that feels like. There are architectural metaphors or carpentry metaphors about being nailed to something or wedged with something or

[18:54]

so on and so forth, the notion that we've built this thing for ourselves, this construct, this person, this self. There's a wonderful collection of metaphors about being, it's like being, imagine yourself in a lotus pond, perhaps in Thailand, because it would be nice to be in Thailand. So you're in this pond, and the water is clear, and limpid and full of light, and there are lotus flowers floating, the pads floating on the surface and so on, and you can see the stalks going down, and there's tendrils and water grasses and so on. So you're sitting there, and then you decide to move. You can do anything. And what happens? The mud comes up off the bottom like this, right? And you've got a... All of a sudden, the water ain't so limpet anymore, right?

[19:58]

And as you move through the water, the vines cling at you, and you just can't do anything without just making a mess of things, right? So it's a wonderful metaphor and really kind of poetic. And the thing that's great about about all that literature is that it's based on this sort of really ancient literary tradition. It was already ancient by the time the koans were collected and written down. And so the people that did it had this vast store of poetic language to draw from, and they use it really beautifully. It's definitely worth going through. And it's not only beautiful, it's accurate. It captures this feeling of what it's like to be in a body, to be in the human condition in the moment and so on. So, trammeled, hemmed in, trapped in a construct in a building that we've made ourselves out of, you know.

[21:11]

two-by-fours and wedges or something like that, right? So why not just, you know, shuck it off, right? That would be nice. The problem is that, you know, as you go through that list of things that give rise to the notion of a person, of a notion of a self, et cetera, they're what makes us human beings, right? It's not just that it's the human condition, it's that It's that that's what makes us human, the ability to do complex planning, the ability to use language, right? These are the things that are our primary birthright and inheritance as humans, right? Wonderful. And if you look at the history of human activity, you might not actually wanna give that up, right?

[22:13]

So think about poetry or pop songs, right? So how does that actually work? So somebody connects with their version of the human condition and notices something that happens to them when they write something down, make an utterance, or sing something in their voice, and they think, I bet that would happen to somebody else if I did it, if I just got out there and sang it, or if I spoke it, and that something would happen in their body, and they do it. And there's this marvelous thing that happens where my human condition connects with your human condition and causes this resonance, this beautiful thing, right? Why would we give that up, right?

[23:16]

So I spent, in addition to spending years playing in rock bands, I also spent years doing engineering, and it's a similar kind of thing. You get a group of people, right? Engineering is a human group activity. You get a bunch of people in a room together, and they have to make something together. And their ability to make this thing together depends deeply and completely on their ability to kind of look each other in the eye and feel good about it. And to think together kind of as a group. It's wonderful. And, you know, not everything we've made is equally great, but humans have made some pretty great things. Using the human condition and using this entanglement with things and entanglement with people, if you look at I mean, one of the things that this Ian Hodder guy says, or doesn't actually come out right out and say, but kind of hints around at, is that the conventional way of thinking about, say, the development of agriculture is that, you know, people invented agriculture and then they kind of decided they needed to live close to each other in order to do it.

[24:27]

The other view is that... people got entangled with each other, and as a result of their entanglement, were living in the same place over a year and discovered, look, I threw these seeds in the ground, and they came up again. That's pretty great. And so, in some ways, you could argue that the single biggest technological revolution that's happened to people and to the planet, the invention of agriculture, just grew out of this entangling, right? Or at very least, it grew up as a kind of interdependent arising with our increasing entanglement with each other. And, you know, who would willingly give up the ability to, oh, I don't know, you know, the middle of the afternoon, day five of a sashim, somebody clacks the clackers together and

[25:31]

you know, a few minutes later, this cookie is sitting in front of me, which is just, it's like a gift, right? It's so wonderful. They taste, you know, delicious, and they're crunchy, or not, floppy sometimes, but in any case, they're wonderful, right? Who would give that up, right? When I moved to, when I started working in Fremont, I was really worried that there wasn't going to be any anything good to eat, because I wasn't sure, I didn't know anything about Fremont. It turns out that there's a huge Indian and Pakistani community in Fremont, and the East Bay location of the restaurant, Tenderloin Restaurant, Shalimar, is in Fremont. And it was right across the street from where I worked. And so the first day we were there, I got out and I walked across, and I... walked in the door and I smelled the spices and there's this room full of people, you know, Pakistani families all kind of having lunch and there's a big plaque on the wall.

[26:39]

And it looked from a distance like a printed circuit board or a chip diagram, right? It was very rectilinear and it had these big sort of blobs and all that sort of thing. And then later I realized it was a, it's a saying from the Quran in Arabic that's written in this peculiar style that I don't really know very much about. But in any case, what it says is, which of Allah's gifts, numerous gifts, will you deny? Which ones will you deny? The cookies? What of that would we willingly give up in order to have relief from suffering? And even if we could, which is a complicated proposition, what would we give up? What would we deny?

[27:40]

What are we going to give back? I don't think if we really think through it, that's how we want to go about it. So what do we do? Anyone know? No. What we do is realize that that's not all there is to the experience of being human, right? That's not all there is to the experience of being alive. Making categories of experience is a very dicey proposition, and, you know, every time you do it, you get it wrong. So I'm gonna make some categories and I'm gonna get it wrong and just bear with me. But there's a couple of sort of categories of human experience that don't come under all the stuff that we were just talking about that are really, that are with us constantly and are kind of crucial to this whole question of what we do.

[28:48]

And the first one is the ability to be compassionate, right? The interesting thing about compassion is that it's built into us from the ground up. We're naturally, fundamentally compassionate beings. And the reason is that when we see other humans doing something or feeling something, we experience it ourselves. We physically enact it in some ways. It doesn't get all the way to the point of moving our hands and arms, but there's this resonance that's set up where when somebody is feeling down somewhere in our body, we're doing it too, right? If we're close and we allow ourselves to connect in that way, right? So, compassion.

[29:49]

And the words that we use to describe it are exactly that, where it's we do this thing together, we feel this thing together, we suffer in this way together. Compassion, sympathy, and so on. People have, if you look at any snippet of human history, it's full of stories of people doing remarkable, self-sacrificing, compassionate acts, seemingly without preparation or forethought, right? And often, the funny thing is, if you talk to, if the person survives the act, and you talk to them afterwards, people who have jumped into floods to rescue people, rescue their fellow people and have barely gotten out alive, right? One, they don't really, they didn't do much thinking about it at the time.

[30:55]

And two, they're often kind of baffled by it. They're as baffled as the person that's interviewing them about what it was that moved them to do that. Because it's an experience and an act that kind of stands outside of the everyday agenda of the constructed self, right? If you think through the ramifications of jumping into a flooding river to save someone or even save a cat or something like that who is clearly drowning, if you think through it, you might say, no, I ain't doing that. But it doesn't work that way, right? And then the next category of experience is this kind of experience of... Well, I mean, it's conventionally sort of called big mind or Buddha mind, right?

[31:55]

We have this, too. We're... It's a... Everyone experiences the world in this way really all the time, right? And... As Blanche said, the one formulation of what the Buddha said when he woke up was, oh look, I see that now that all beings have the wisdom and compassion of the Buddhas, or the awakened ones, they're just, well, to use the language we were using earlier, they're just bound up in this construct of the self in a way that makes it difficult for them to see it. But it leaks through all the time, right? It's, my favorite example of it these days is biking, right? So you get on a bike and you start to ride and things go along. And after a while, and particularly if you've been doing, if you've done it a lot, right, you sort of get tuned up in this way where you become very intimate with the bicycle and you're

[33:12]

You can feel the whippiness in the frame. You can feel the ways in which the bicycle responds to your motion. You make these tiny kind of intimate adjustments that allow you to connect more deeply with the bicycle and allow it to become more and more a part of your body. And after a while, you start to have this experience that the bike is actually a living part of you. And here's the thing, you have that experience because in some fundamental way that you miss most of the time, it's true, right? And if that's not enough, after a while, the road feels alive too, right? Because the road is alive. So maybe you're riding in a, somewhere deep in West Marin and there are meadowlarks singing back and forth and so on.

[34:19]

You know, where is self and other in that? So, here we all are. We have this, we have this constant, we have the, the wisdom and compassion of the awakened ones were, you know, these things are clearly a part of our everyday life because when you talk to people, I mean, maybe it's a little bit like, you know, when you buy a particular kind of, like say you buy a Prius, right, so... So pretty shortly thereafter, you realize that everyone in the road is driving a Prius. As you start delving into this and you start talking to people, these things come out of their mouths where you go, yeah, look at that, that's it. That's the wisdom and compassion of the awakened ones right there.

[35:28]

Whether they're Zen students or not, it doesn't matter. So then here's the question. Why aren't we all... fully awakened, completely happy. Why is the world such a complicated place? Why are people so incredibly awful to each other by turns, and so on and so forth? It's a great question. It's been the central question of a lot of pretty famous Buddhist lives, including Dogen, the guy who brought Zen to Japan. He spent his whole life wrestling with that question and drove his travel to China, drove his writings thereafter. Why, and it's the first, it's the subject of the first chapter in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, too.

[36:34]

What's hard about practice? What's hard about this thing of, of living in such a way, of being completely human in such a way that not only the agenda of the constructed self is expressed, but also this big mind, the ability to connect and feel the... the pulse of the world, the ability to resonate with people and understand their plight and condition because it's yours as well, right? What's so hard? If one way of formulating the bodhisattva way and the path that we're on is that it's just the activity of becoming completely human and letting all aspects of the human experience take their rightful place in the experience of being completely human, what could possibly be hard about that?

[37:50]

Well, here's the thing, right? The sort of construct of the self, what it does is it takes all human experience and it processes it and casts it and catalogs it, makes up stories about it, and so on, in such a way that it's integrated into the construct of the self, right? So the way Suzuki Roshi puts it is that he says, you know, the first time you chant the Heart Sutra, you might do a pretty great job, right? It might be great, even if you don't know it that well. If you chant it 100 times, you may start drawing some conclusions about it, like, I'm really bad at chanting the hard sutra, or I'm pretty good at it, but that guy over there, that's okay. And look, here we are.

[38:52]

We're all sitting, it's a group of people sitting in a room, entangled with each other and entangled with the things and forms of practice, right? It's a fertile field for the activity of the constructed self, right? And... I don't have a watch. What does that particular clanging mean? Oh, it's 11, okay. Well, I better wrap it up then. The... So that's what makes it difficult. That's what, you know, sitting can be easy, can be hard. The forms of Zen practice are complicated, and, you know, every time I do oryoki, I mess it up in one way or mess it up in another. And, you know, this morning I left the house, walked right by my altar, and forgot my rakasu, and I had to drive back home and pick it up before I could come and talk to you because I'd feel naked without it, right?

[39:56]

So these things are complicated. But the thing that's really hard is to let the constructed self be the constructed self, to let the compassionate self be the compassionate self, to let the big mind be big mind, and not... not cling to one or the other, not condemn this activity because it doesn't meet some expectation about what we had, some expectation we had about what practice was supposed to be like. I was once talking to this woman. She said a wonderful thing. She said, you know, I was... I was in the garden and I saw these flowers and I was so moved by them, they were so beautiful that I was moved to tears.

[41:01]

And then the thought arose and she was moved to tears. And then I thought, how shameful of me to be thinking like that. So here's someone who's had this wonderful experience and in the course of three thoughts has managed to kind of make it difficult for herself, right? Remarkable, how do we do that? And what's the way in which we can practice diligently, work hard at this activity, and at the same time, not do that to ourselves, right? So that's what's good about zazen. And monastic life in general, but zazen, has this flavor where we sit down and whatever agenda we brought to sitting, it shows itself and 10 minutes later, we're still sitting there.

[42:14]

And something else happens. And it presents us this opportunity to observe the self in action, observe all, actually embody all flavors of the human experience and just stick with it, right? And to see that even though the activity of the self, this sort of constructed self is very compelling, And it has a really powerful kind of gravity. I mean, that's sort of my favorite metaphor for it, is that when you're really engaged in it, it's like your consciousness is kind of sucked into this black hole by the gravity of that activity. I think in some ways it's just by the sheer difficulty of the activity, the amount of work that's required to do it. And very little lets in. But we can enact, or gets in, but we can enact over and over again this...

[43:17]

Letting go of that. And I think everyone who's done any sitting at all knows what that feels like. The gravity of thought kind of lets go a little bit, and our awareness expands out and fills our body and mind. And all of a sudden, there's the street noise. There's the birds and the trees. And the... the gravity of whatever thought it was we were thinking before has a completely different flavor now, right? So what is it that we're letting go of, right? What's important to let go of? Based on what we've said, it seems like the first thing that's probably worth letting go of is the notion of purity, right? All this stuff is mixed up in our bodies and minds. We experience it all together, all at the same time. always exactly at the same time.

[44:19]

It's not like the discursive thought never lets up. Every now and again we get to a place that's pretty great, where it's not yammering on in this way that it normally does. But many times it doesn't. Many times it just continues like that. the notion of purity, the notion of any particular notion of clarity, probably good to give it up. Just let your mind be as clear as it is now. And then watch what happens. So, there it is, the proposition of being completely human. So, go through the world with a sense that not that the life of the world hems you in, but that it's a support and a fabric that

[45:43]

is helpful and useful in your life. It shows you where things are. It keeps your body and mind engaged, right? When you meet someone or something to... to act compassionately and carefully because, not because... you're blissed out and no feelings of anger, discomfort, or anything else like that arise, not because you've somehow banished those feelings to some other world, but because you recognize them for what they are and you recognize them in the people that you meet every day. To be this way, who would not want to be this way? So thank you.

[46:55]

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