Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming to the Dharma Talk today at Green Gulch Farm. Our speaker today is San Francisco Zen Center Central Abbott, Ed Sadezan. He's making a consent offering and bows in the zendo now, and will take his seat shortly to begin the talk. A reminder, as always, we have the live transcript feature enabled. You should see the option somewhere on your device to show or hide the automated subtitles as you'd like. After Abbott Ed takes his seat, we'll have the opportunity to join him in the assembly in the chanting of the opening verse, which I will post in the chat window now. and perfect dharma.

[13:55]

First thing to do is test out all this equipment. Can you hear me? Is it working good? Excellent. Well, good morning. So nice to be here. I have not been in this hall for two years because of the pandemic. So that's a long time to not have sat in this seat giving a lecture. Thank Jiryu for inviting me. hosting me here this morning. All of you and my many good friends at Green Goal. And all of my friends who I'm now seeing here online, welcome to the Green Goal Farm Sunday morning lecture. I guess I feel a certain amount of just the joy and thankfulness to come here to Green Goal to see it so well taken care of. by all of you during this difficult time to both take care of the physical environment, these beautiful temples, and take care of your practice so beautifully.

[15:48]

So thank you very much for your practice. Yes, I noticed her when she came in a beautiful Jesus statue with her wish-fulfilling gem standing behind me. And in some ways, I feel that such a wonderful, great reminder of all the wonderful bodhisattvas all over the world, especially in Ukraine and Eastern Europe who are taking care of all the mothers and children that are running from this enormous tragedy that's happening over there. Bodhisattvas that are taking care of them are certainly to be held in our heart. Jesus is a manifestation of the heart's desire to take care of children all over the world. It was even more so

[16:50]

Yes. Go higher. How's that? Okay. I noticed it was last week we had some audio problems. We don't use incense at the city center. So I think that's the first time I've been in New England and actually offered incense in a couple of years, too. A wonderful tradition that we keep doing in this large space. So I'm going to talk a little bit. In January, Shindo, David, and I gave a four-week class on a newly discovered recorded lectures of Suzuki Roshi. Maybe all of you are familiar with them, but these were 20 plus audio recordings of Victor Oshii that were done at Marian Derby's home in 1965.

[18:15]

In fact, they were the very earliest recordings done of Victor Oshii. She had a case recorder there and had a discussion with Victor Oshii. She said, would you let me record these? And he said yes, and apparently expressed some interest to her about having a book published on his lectures. So it did turn out that those lectures that she recorded there did become Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And today I'm going to share a few paragraphs from the very first lecture Shinjo and I taught from and the very last of the four lectures that we talked about. And it was very special because the first lecture that they discovered was the actual lecture that became the prologue of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. The famous saying, you know, in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. And to actually listen to Suzuki Roshi give that talk, it's so beautiful to hear. And just to do a little promotion, you can go to the San Francisco Zen Center website and click on offerings.

[19:23]

And then you'll see a little box among the many offerings there that says Suzuki Roshi Archive. You click on that and it lists all these lectures that we're sort of rolling out every two weeks. We put a new one there. So there's 15 of them. posted now, and the audio quality is excellent. She had a great tape recorder back then, and the tapes were preserved for over 50 years. What's interesting about the tape, when you actually listen to it, of course, is that you realize how much editing was done in producing the lectures that are in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. That phrase, a beginner's mind, essentially becomes synonymous with Zen. Isn't that wonderful? A Zen mind is a beginner's mind. It makes you think you know what a Zen mind is. Unless you wonder, well, what is a beginner's mind? What does Suzuki Roshi actually mean by a beginner's mind?

[20:24]

And this is the actual text from that audio, because those audios are all beautifully transcribed. He goes, in a beginner's mind, we have many possibilities, but in expert mind, there is not so much possibility. So in our practice, it is important to resume our original mind, our inmost mind, which we ourselves, and even we ourselves, do not know what it is. That's from the master's mind. Even we ourselves do not know what it is, this original mind, this inmost mind, which is, of course, equating with the beginner's mind. So this is a kind of exploration. What is this mind? The beginner's word has a kind of familiarity to us. A beginner's mind means...

[21:26]

And he goes on, a beginner's mind means our experience should always be refreshed and renewed. It means always have the joy of discovering something, the same joy as children discovering something new. We have an intuitive feeling for that. We can kind of cast our mind back to when we were... Maybe we can't. I can't remember. I kind of think I can remember early days when I was learning how to move my hands as a child. But anyway, the discovery of what it is to have a human body, the discovery of what it is to walk, that beginner's sense, which sort of gets slowed down a little bit in our old age. But watching children would get that same kind of sense. So I think we get a feeling for that beginner's mind of a mind of curiosity curious open mind that we can connect to kind of inquiring mind which we always say is such an important part of that i've been either fortunate or unfortunate one never knows about this but i've had many careers in my life i've been cast into many situations where i had to learn i knew what i was doing

[22:49]

So I was always having to be a beginner. I was a beginner at farming, a beginner at marketing, a beginner at exam, a beginner at many different things that I did. And of course, my beginner's mind always was clouded with a certain amount of anxiety about being a beginner. But the beginner's mind we're talking about here, hopefully we have not so much anxiety, but more a sense of refreshing inquisitiveness. But the more important thing is he goes on, he says an inmost mind an original mind, like it's something we already have, our original mind, a mind we had always, even before we were born, this mind was with us. It kind of reminds me of that wonderful koan, ordinary mind is the way. Dago asked Nanquan, what is the way? go with probably like some of you maybe not some of the my friends that have been here for 40 years but some of you that have been here

[23:56]

It's so beautiful, this ordinary mind is the way. And then GiaoGyo, wondering kind of what he's talking about, says, should I try to direct myself toward it? And Nanquan said, if you try to direct yourself, you betray your own practice. GiaoGyo says, how can I know the way if I don't direct myself? And this beautiful, almost poetic answer that Nanquan said, the way, is not subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion. Not knowing is blankness or stupidity. If you truly reach the genuine way, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can this be discussed at the level of affirmation and negation? Well, that's great news.

[25:24]

That means that my just everyday mind was this way. Kind of always got it here. No problem. I mean, that's great. Except for I came to Zen because my ordinary mind way was causing suffering, filled with delusion and craziness. So what's he actually talking about here? But nonchalant is saying... everyday actions, ordinary things, speaking to someone, having breakfast, cleaning the dishes, and so on. These things that we have limited and reduced by our preconceptions and habits of mind, by our conditioning, these things are in fact something wonderful, something vast, unknown, and mysterious. If only we could let go and shed ourselves of our limited ways of looking at things.

[26:29]

We could find joy and satisfaction with everything. This is the Zen message and understanding. To let the light inside of everything shine forth. I think that is what makes Zen practice so wonderful. the recognition that it's not about special activity. It's about each and every activity and each and every moment. It can continue a little bit with a poetic aspect of this beautiful story. Wumann has a verse which goes, spring comes with flowers, autumn with the moon, Summer with breeze, winter with snow. When the idle concerns don't hang in your mind, that is your best season.

[27:43]

Returning to the Georgie's beginner's mind, He was kind of a living example of that mind. It was a very fortunate fact for me, the man who lived with that kind of mind. To meet him was to feel his immediacy. Trungpa, who I met in those early days, said in the memorial to Shizik Ruchi, all his gestures and communications were naked and to this point, as though you were dealing with a burning tip of an incense stick. At the same time, this was by no means irritating me, for whatever happened around the situation was quite accommodating. In my experience, this was similar. He had an uncanny sense of the moment and how to respond to it. But when I think back on him, the most important part was his kindness to us.

[28:47]

which is clear in this quote at the end of the beginner's mind talk that I did in January for that small group that he did for that small group that's in the living room. And he goes, this is maybe 15 or 20 people in the living room. This was before Tassar, before city center and the director would go and visit them in Los Alto and go over to Berkeley and visit Nellis Place and go up to Mill Valley, visit students there, small groups thinking. And he said, I was very much impressed by your practice this morning. Although your posture was not perfect, and there's laughter on the face, not just his laughter, but everybody's laughter, but the feeling you have here is wonderful. There is no comparison to it. The feeling you have here is wonderful. There is no comparison to it. At the same time, we should make our effort to keep this feeling forever in your practice.

[29:51]

This is a very, very important point. I've been to Eheiji where Suzuki Roshi was trained. Their posture is quite good at Eheiji. Suzuki Roshi knew what good posture was. And so that laughed. And we knew our posture was so great. But the feeling was so wonderful. Our effort, our sincerity, needing his effort and sincerity, is what established this practice here in America. And I also like that comment, you should keep this feeling forever. It's a kind of, a little bit of a tricky... It's not recommended that we try to measure how our practice is going. It gets confusing and it's not very, it's actually impossible.

[30:55]

But still, you should have some feeling in your practice that it's kind of going okay, that it's the right thing for you to be doing. Even if you're going through a tough phase, There's a part of you that knows, okay, I need, this is difficulty that's coming up in my life that I need to deal with, because this is what I need to pay care of. A friend of mine who was dealing with couples therapy, a student of mine, actually, and she said to me, no, I don't really look forward to going to therapy, but I know that I should. I know that this is important. So you have to have some feeling like that. I'm looking forward to the time when we come into the room on a Sunday lecture and there's a lot of people who are enjoying having this whole space all to yourself.

[32:22]

I think it's time for us to come back and be with us. I'm hoping for that. That's our city center. So I'm going to switch because I have a little bit more time and talk about that. another lecture that we previewed in that four-week session. And in that lecture, Siddhartha Roshi said, the purpose of studying Buddhism is to study ourselves and to forget ourselves. When we forget ourselves, we actually are the true activity of big existence or reality itself. When we realize this, there is no problem whatsoever in this world, and we can enjoy our life without feeling any difficulties. So this teaching, you should be familiar with it, comes from a well-known paragraph of the Gendro Koan, and Kasutana Hashi's translation is, to study the Buddha ways, to study the Self.

[33:27]

To study the Self is to forget the Self. To forget the Self is to be actualized by myriad things. So I thought it was interesting that in 1965, Sucharoshi introduced this. Up until 1965, Sucharoshi lectured mostly on the Blue Cliff Record. I have all the early transcripts of those. They're all different, beautiful Blue Cliff Record, which are hopefully coming out soon in another book from Zen Center, edited versions of it. Anyway, Kaz Tanahashi, who's been a long-term friend of Zen Center and a great activist in the world, met Suzuki Roshi in 1964. He'd come over from Japan, and he said, what kind of text do you teach, Reverend Suzuki? He said, the Blue Cliff Record. I said, why not Dogen? Dogen is too difficult for American students, Suzuki said.

[34:32]

As if Luke's record is easy. But anyway, and then Kaz said, don't you think you should present your best when you teach foreign students? I think Dogen is your best. I believe Dogen is not only an important Zen master and imaginative poet, but the greatest thinker Japan has ever produced. He is fantastic. It doesn't matter if your students don't understand him. Keep Dogen. This is from a very young 20-year-old person telling Tsukiroshi what to do. So I think Tsukiroshi immediately asked him to give a lecture, which I think flummoxed his callous a little bit. But anyway, whether influenced by cause or not, in 1965, Tsukiroshi began teaching Dogen. It isn't as if those early lectures around the book that's directed films have the feeling of Dogen because I think that's mostly what Tsukiroshi taught. But he started in 1965 doing a series of lectures on the Genjo Koan, which is sort of the first text that's most often studied in English in the Shogo Genzo.

[35:48]

And he chose this paragraph that was very familiar as the first he presented, kind of in some ways, the essence of the Genjo Koan, and that's the essence of the Shogo Genzo, as some would say. Anyway, he gave 15 talks between 1965, Aladdin 65, Aladdin 66, and some in 67, on the Genjo Koan, which were assembled as a book, Dogen's Genjo Koan, Three Commentaries, beautiful collections of these. He didn't teach sort of systematically, but they managed to assemble all the lectures into a systematic way through the Genjo Koan. And just for those of you who are not familiar, those of you out there in the world, I'm sure all the students here are familiar with Genjo Koan. Genjo Koan has many, that's the title of this particular essay, has many translations.

[36:51]

The Koan of the present moment, or to answer the question from true reality through the practice of our everyday activity. That's Shohaka Okumura. And I kind of like that. To answer the question from the true reality. In this moment, there's a question for you. And through your practice of everyday activity, you answer that question. Suzuki Roshi's translation of the Gendron was the koan of everyday life. Everyday life, koan for you. Suzuki Roshi taught the practice of zazen and the genjo koan are inextricably bound. Our practice of answering that koan of everyday life and zazen are inextricably bound. The genjo koan, distilled through his years of practicing zazen, was the core of Suga Kiroshi's teaching.

[37:55]

So I'm going to talk a little bit about it. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. That means observe your life honestly. Be willing to admit, this is how I feel. Not, I wish I felt some other way. I mean, you can say that, and then you can notice, oh, this is how I wish I felt. But anyway, view your actual life. What are you thinking? How your body feels? What you're doing? This is how I'm interacting with the world. And to study yourself this way is without prejudice or judgment. We study ourselves to accept ourselves, to settle into ourselves, to stand in our actual life, and to begin to see our life as much bigger than our mind thinks it is, and much freer than our mind thinks it is. This is a quote from an earlier lecture of Suzuki Roshibarai.

[39:04]

ran into and thought it was appropriate here, Zen may be said to be the practice of cultivating our mind to make it deep and open enough to accept the various ideas and thoughts that are there. When this kind of acceptance takes place, everything will orient itself according to its own nature and the circumstances. We call this activity the great activity. Reality can be said to be the bed that is deep and soft enough to accept everything as it is. Deep and soft enough to accept everything as it is. So I'm gonna... go in a little bit different direction and talk about what studying, another sort of aspect of studying the characters that this study comes from can be translated to be intimate with.

[40:13]

We're trying to be intimate with our life. And the characters have two components. One meaning is wings of a bird and the other is being self. So to study means to study the way a baby bird studies his parents to learn to fly. And I was kind of fascinated by that, so I went on a marvelous internet. Sometimes it's marvelous. And they have these videos of these sea birds up in Alaska that are raised on 300-foot cliffs above the ocean. And after about 20 days of their parents flying out and getting food from the ocean, bringing it back, they have to fly. And they don't get any rehearsal. This is just watching their parent flying and then They just jump off and score. And they have to make it all the way to the ocean. There's beaches down there. It's just amazing to watch. And somehow when I was watching that, I had that sort of sense of become intimate with our life.

[41:18]

It's also sort of in some ways to plunge into it. You know, to dive into our life, to take a risk and live out. like that bird, baby bird comes off the cliff and lands in the ocean. Maybe it was like that when you first learned how to get up and walk, so we can do it again. Not so much using our thinking mind to figure yourself out, to take the risk to really become who you actually are. That's completely, totally unique person. And figure out how to express the deep connection you have to everything else through your unique person.

[42:20]

So, Siddiqui Rashi says, if you try to understand who you are, it is an endless task, and you will never see yourself. It is very difficult to try to think about yourself. To reach a conclusion is almost impossible, and if you can continue trying, you will become crazy, and you won't know what to do with yourself. That is true. If you're going to use your mind to figure out who you are, you're in deep trouble. So he quotes this thing from Dungshan. Don't try to see yourself objectively. Don't try to seek for information about yourself. That is information. The real you is not that kind of thing. And Sri Krishna gave a beautiful example which I've always loved. He said, when you see someone practicing sincerely, you see yourself. If you are impressed by someone's practice, you may say, oh, she is doing very well. That key is neither she nor you.

[43:23]

When you are struck by someone's practice, You see yourself. That is the real you. That you is the pure experience of practicing. You know, I think in some sense he was talking to us because he would look at people as practicing and say, I want to live like that. I want to be like that. But in seeing it, And you being struck by the quality of this practice, that is you. That is your practice. That's the real you, that connection. It's in that connection that your practice is, in that connection that you are. It's to experience life without the subject-object separation. It is not I seeing you out there, but me feeling the connection.

[44:25]

To study the self is to forget the self. Almost worth figuring out who the self is, and now we're supposed to forget it. Well, there are many ways to talk about this, but I'm just going to point out one area. To forget the self is to see your own craziness and not take it so personally. Be with your experience in a nonjudgmental way, and you may notice how much of your experience is around yourself. your self-concern. Did I do okay? Why did this person disrespect me? They don't accept me. They don't like me. Self-concern is the organizing principle of all our thoughts and feelings. You almost get that feeling after you sadhsagin for a while. Why is all my thinking about me in some way or another And this, of course, is a cause of great suffering.

[45:41]

If we can let go of our self-concern, that is the root to happiness. Such a relief to put that down for a while. He says, when we forget ourselves, we actually are the true activity of the big existence, the reality itself. When you realize this fact, there's no problem whatsoever in this world, and we can enjoy our life without feeling any difficulties. It doesn't mean that we don't feel suffering of the world. some capacity to have joy in the midst of all, of our suffering and the suffering of the world. Of course, then, this is the magic part of this thing.

[46:50]

To study the self is to forget the self, and then to forget the self is to be actualized by Maria. naturalized by new things. You let the entire world flow through you. When you let yourself go, you can appreciate the world you live in, even the tragic part. No longer dividing it into things that are good for you and things that are bad for you. This is renunciation. There's a wonderful story that I read in a book by Dale Wright, Philosophic Meditations on San Buddhism. He was talking about Wang Bo. Iconic teacher in the time dynasty. And Wang Gov said, pictures enlightened ancestors in real life situations facing themselves so that the true contour of the situation comes to disclosure in them. It's a big sentence, a lot in there.

[47:55]

Facing themselves. Forgetting themselves. so that the true contour of whatever situation they're in is disclosed in them and through them. Open ourselves to the world and let it be us. They encounter the world not through acts of will and mind primarily, but through relinquishment, letting go of themselves, opening their own minds and will for the larger context of the situation that then becomes manifest through that. Who knows what one will actually say, but somehow over a thousand years, somebody had assembled it into a beautiful idea. Maybe I probably talked enough.

[48:58]

Finish. I think the Yasin Tosir Yerushu's teaching is if you live in each moment, that is Zen. Whether you're sitting or working, living in each moment is Zen. It is our everyday life. Look and see what's going on in this moment of your living. Every moment is gone in a flash. Life goes by very quickly. Whatever our problem, difficult relationships, one great loss, pain in our body, suffering in our mind, that is your life, our life. But we get lost in our problem. We don't notice how marvelous it is to be alive because we are so busy.

[50:04]

We don't notice how wonderful it is to be alive and share this life with other people and how great it is that we are together. We forget. We forget to be grateful to live a human life and how good it is. It's natural. It's a part of being human to forget. But if we practice, we'll forget that's all. May you all be safe and healthy. Thank you very much. Where?

[51:09]

Thank you. Thank you everybody online for your patience today with the audio and your presence at this talk. If you have a question you'd like to offer to Ed, please send it via chat to Green Gulch Zendo.

[52:30]

Yes. Naturally, we'll be confused. Oh, yes. He asked me about from the koan where Nanshwan says, if you direct your attention, you'll miss it. And he says, but on the other hand, don't we have to direct our attention? That's a quick summary of it. It is a confusing area. First of all, of course, when you raise the question of attention, what is our deepest intention? Clearly in life, to the extent that you can align the direction of your life with your deepest intention, that's a good thing. The problem is that the mind's idea about what is your deepest intention is off-falling it. And you get kind of distracted by the thinking mind. That's why there's so much of our practice that is actually sort of in form, where you just follow the forms and get a feeling.

[54:17]

So I guess as a simple example, if you want to do a gacho bow, you know, you listen to the instruction that everybody gives you, you know, your palms are like this, they're not like that, they're a certain distance from your nose or certain heights, depending on your age, maybe, you know, the form or not. An entire form there. So you intend to do that correctly. But when you bow, you let go of all that. You climb into the feeling of what a bow is, which is not something that you can do with your mind. It is with your entire being that you have to do it. of comments and is that was that helpful yeah and you're asking the wrong person

[55:35]

You've asked me what it means to retire. I'm 77 years old and I clearly haven't retired yet. Did I say retire on this thing? It's just a question. Well, yes, in a year from now, I will be stepping down from being the central abbot of Zen Center, which will have been nine years of being an abbot of Zen Center. I think that I will hand off a kind of burden that is unique to that goal, to my successor to David Villeman. But I imagine I will continue practicing Zen for the rest of my life, and I imagine I will be involved in the Zen Center in various ways for a while, because I'm not a very good I've retired from several careers.

[56:39]

I retired from a 20-year career in high tech when I was 50. That lasted about two years before I started. So my feeling about my personal retirement will be I will spend some time helping the successors transition into their positions. I will get to spend more time with my senior students, bringing them along the way to being teachers. I have a small group in Mill Valley where I'll continue teaching and I will come maybe relax a little bit more. Maybe go on a vacation with my wife somewhere with the airplane. And I would love to have more of a conversation with you. Would you like to say something about you? Maybe we both live long enough to really discover lots of daily things and that we all get to practice together for a long time.

[58:27]

It's just, for me, it's so different to give a lecture to people versus a TV screen, like a mic and a monitor. I just, you know, it's just not the same thing. I know some people are telling me they love giving up. To me, it's just like, to sit in this beautiful space with you, to feel the strength of your sitting practice while I'm sitting here, so encouraging. It's just different for me. Yeah. Yeah.

[59:36]

Well, Linda is asking me about that Juan Bo quote that I gave, which I'll repeat again. Plombo pictures enlightened ancestors in real life situations facing themselves so that the true contour of the situation comes to disclosure in them. So I guess the question is, how much of the suffering of the flowing and thought television started in the inner and the media can learn and break? And I kind of limit myself to it just because I have lots to do. And I had this experience the other morning, I get up early, five o'clock or something like that, go out in the morning, feel the spring all around us here now. And I take that in and it's wonderful.

[60:37]

And I picked up the New York Times and I take it into my dining room and I open up the New York Times and go, ah, terrible. So that's our life. I think we should embrace the beauty of this day that we're experiencing here at Gingo, and life coming back in springtime the way it previously does in our world in time, and this fact that we have this enormous immense human suffering. And it's not just limited to what's going on on the front page of the New York Times. One of my groups who have terrible problems with sick children. So this is part of our life. The idea that studying Zen is going to keep you from suffering, that's not true. You will just suffer in some ways more.

[61:39]

So I think that's what it means to live a full life. to have the agony and the ecstasy community have to develop the capacity to embrace it all. If you want to love deeply, you're going to suffer deeply because you're going to love people that believe you. And it's just a but. I think that's what influenced my life. Live it fully. easy to say, hard to do. Yeah.

[62:47]

Yeah, well, fear is fear. Oh, yes. I'm so not used to fear. He's asking, you know, if you want to find into your life, how do you deal with the fear that often arises in any situation? So fear is built into us. It's part of our animal structure. And it's important when you're a kid, you can fear crossing the street and look before you cross. And if you're walking in the jungle, you got to watch out for tigers and things. So fear is a natural... response to environment. Unfortunately, in the modern world where we live and various things that come on, we're often very fearful about things that don't need to be fearful about. And I think the heart chakra has a great sentence in there, which I can't quote right off the top of my head right now. But my approach to fear is I almost always notice it. Oh, I'm afraid.

[63:48]

And is this fear stopping me from doing something? And I almost always do it. I mean, besides that the fear is not actually real. That is, it's a construct of my early personality issues and problems and stuff. And so my effort is not to let the fear stop me from doing what I think needs to be done in my life. And the more I have done that in my life, the more I've gotten a better kind of handle on the fear. So it's not running my life. It's just a part of life that, you know, and there are sometimes fear is a good warning. Yeah, maybe I should veer away from that, you know. Maybe I shouldn't be so experimental in that area. But anyway, that's a whole world for discussion, but that's a quick answer. Do you have a follow-up? Here when what?

[65:21]

Yeah. Well, fortunately, you get to sit a lot of zazen. That is the place where it's kind of magical if you sit in the same location. I think you guys have assigned seats here in this end of. I'm used to the seat. You're used to who's sitting next to you. You go sit there day after day in the same posture. You develop a kind of strength, I would say, or even power to absorb what's going on in your life. You don't have to plunge into it. It's coming at you. But there's a kind of capacity you develop by sitting with your life, especially when you do it for long periods of time, where you can actually take it in. So that's my recommendation. In Zazen, open yourself up to what happens during Zazen.

[66:32]

Yeah, well, I think, you know, oh, yes, we're talking about this, the sense of, are you my, I think you are my, where's Carolyn? Yes, over there. The kind of back and forth, you know. How would we survive without our health? My goodness, not very well, I'll tell you that much. So the question is, you know, well, what about me? Don't I have to have a strong personality, a strong ego to function in the world? And yeah, in modern psychology, you need to build up some kind of personality strength. But what we're talking about here is a little something different. It's in the midst of having that strong enough ego to actually be willing to let go of your ego, I guess is the way you put it. It comes up in all kinds of ways.

[68:04]

Sometimes you have to draw boundaries. You have to say, that person over there is not treating me well, and what they're saying is inappropriate, and what they're doing is inappropriate, and I will have the strength to act in a certain way, and based on... That's a very good question. I'm not sure I have a complete answer to it. I do think... Over time in our practice, we get a stronger sense of who we are and feel comfortable in that, but we let go of it. We're not always presenting it as some kind of way of protecting us from the world. It's just who we are and we're used to it and what we need to have to do. Good question. I'll have to think about it more. Look out there.

[69:13]

There's a world out there. I wonder if Jiria is there. Do they have any questions out there in that world, Jiria? Not yet? Oh, you're Jiria now. I mean, you're acting like Jiria's avatar. I felt very fortunate that when I arrived here, I did not trip over all of this equipment. It used to be much simpler to get up here. Thank you very much. There's your answer. Get rid of all that hindrance. Yeah, well, Zoom was a whole revolution in my beginner's mind.

[70:42]

I had to figure out so many things to give a lecture over Zoom, and I lead lots of... I'm in Zoom meetings all day long, so I've had to run how to conduct meetings with five people in it, how to conduct meetings with 20 people in it. Yeah. And... I think that Zoom has opened up something that is fabulous and like a miracle in many ways. Funny a downside with the internet, et cetera, but one of my students, which was Xena and Español in the city center with seven or eight people whose primary language was Spanish would come in discuss Havana in Spanish. And then when the pandemic hit, that went online.

[71:46]

And then all of a sudden, various friends started saying, well, this thing's online now. And I've got a friend in Colombia. Maybe he can tune in. And I've got a friend in Argentina. And now all of a sudden, we've got hundreds of people. We had to rename it something. We couldn't call it Zen in Espanol when discussing the Dharma. So it's every day's end now. But hundreds of people are now taking that class from Spain to Argentina to Colombia, all over South America, because there's so little actual Zen practice happening in South America. And to have teachers from our lineage able to spread the Dharma in that way is marvelous. great thing. And there's a kind of, I've learned there's a kind of, I just did, in fact, with this group, there were six of them that wanted to do Jiu-Kai.

[72:50]

So two of them were in this country, three of them, and then two flew in from Argentina, and one couldn't fly in because we had the wrong vaccine, so we couldn't get in. So we did a Jiu-Kai ceremony. I did it in English because my Spanish was with us in my student translated. And we had somebody who was getting the precepts via Zoom in Argentina. So it was in English, in Spanish, and via Zoom. It was fabulous. It was just the greatest experience everybody had. So I think this is clearly making many things different, and there's many aspects of it that are wonderful. So I embrace it, but as I said, If I'm going to give a talk like this, I prefer to do it to people. And it's wonderful that you're still here participating with us too. Welcome.

[74:03]

I remember the days when it had to be a large corporation family special rooms in order to do a teleconference with somebody somewhere else in the world. This is amazing. can completely rephrase it, but I think it's something like, you know, when you plunge, well, one way I heard it is when you plunge into your life, you somehow lose your ability to discriminate when you have to be careful about something or lose some control that would be problematic.

[75:43]

And, um, Usually when I'm, so to clarify, she's also saying, you know, when you have to make a life decision, how do you discern the right path and plunging into the moment help you discern the right path or not? But maybe the right path involves larger, more strategic aspects of that. I don't know how you make, decisions about determining your life path. I've never figured out how it happened. I never knew how I decided, why I married this person, why I left my career as a professor in mathematics and went to class hard, a class is done, why I left Zen Center and went off and became an executive in high test, why I left high test at the height of my career and went back and was too slow as being built.

[76:58]

I, you know, these things are mysteries, you know. And the biggest decisions are the most mysterious of all. But, I would say, being more fully in who you are and more fully plunged into this, the feeling of your life, the intention of your life, is usually the best route for making those decisions, I've found. Because if you spend all your time in your head writing down the reasons why I should go in this direction, the reasons I shouldn't go in this direction, I mean, that's it. process when some people go through. But I think it's just to recognize these are not easy decisions, and you feel your way through them, and you feel your way through them if you're practiced as deeply as you can. And that means, you know, like immersing yourself. But your question also incited the first question I heard, which I've always found interesting about subjectivities.

[78:00]

He would be with you, and you would feel that he was almost lost in his connection with you. And yet, the very next moment, he was doing something else. Like, he didn't move the ground of who he was in this process, you know? It's not, you know, this can be misinterpreted as giving yourself over to someone and they're just sort of controlling yourself. He was always somehow who he was and yet could make that connection and become one with you in the mind. Does that make sense? you know, sometimes we think when we have to make a big decision, it's like, oh, big decisions are hard.

[79:06]

And I was, when I had to make, when I decided to make, when I, I never know if I had decided to make decisions, when life said, you're going to make a change here, I always gave myself enough space to see if I could settle into myself better before I made the move. so that when I made the move, the direction I went into came from Ibiza place. So there was a time after I'd been in Zen Center for 10 years, and I'd been president of Zen Center and done a lot of things, and I knew it was time for me to go out and work. I had lots of interesting opportunities that came my way. But I waited, and I gave myself time to actually settle into what I wanted to do. to find something that I thought was more in accord with my fundamental sense and my direction. So for me, that's been one of the things I've done. I've taken sometimes six months in doing this animation just to make sure I feel into it.

[80:14]

Everybody develops their own style and everything. Good luck. The wonder of living a life. After I got over my nipple, when I was in my early 20s, wondering whether I'd ever figure out anything, when I kind of gave that up and decided just to live it. Well, I can't do anything without you.

[81:28]

Fold this up. Thank you, everybody, again for coming. Really appreciate your presence. In the chat, I offered a link. If you feel you're able to make a donation to our temples at this time, please know that we really do appreciate and rely on them.

[82:34]

If anyone would like to sign off with a goodbye, feel free to unmute yourself now. Thanks again for being here. Thank you.

[82:49]

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