Good evening, everybody. Thank you for coming and bringing your energy and your practice to this evening, which is supposedly a talk by me. And I'll go along with that as best I can. What I normally ask people to do when I'm giving a talk is just to sit Zazen. And that way, if the talk is too boring or too uninteresting, at least you get to sit a period of Zazen, which I think is never a waste of time. And it also means that if I run out of words, you just sit there in silence.

[01:09]

It's a pleasure to be back at Tassajara. It's a pleasure to be practicing here. It's a joy to see how much care and attention the community here give to the temple. And it's a pleasure to be practicing yoga with Sherry and about 20 other people. To see where yoga and Zen meet, overlap, where they have common ground. They're both looking at being present. They have varying ways of entering into that existence.

[02:12]

I'm also enjoying, as I always do on these rare visits back, one of my favorite things of Tassahara, is the creek. I've been really enjoying the constant sound of flowing waters. And last night after Zazen, I'm wearing four layers of cotton, so even though there's a nice cool breeze coming in through the open windows, I'm kind of sweaty. So I took a shower and then I went into the outdoor plunge. And just to be soaking there in this pleasant warm water and to hear the sound of the creek.

[03:19]

And to let my gaze go upwards and look at the I don't know how many stars we have. Millions. Look at all these stars in the night sky. And I couldn't help thinking that some of them probably also have the sound of the creek, planets going around them. And then I thought, well, maybe they don't have the sound of the creek. Maybe they're planets where they have flowing water, but ears have not yet evolved. So you just have water flowing in silence. But on some of them, ears may have evolved, and they have the sound of creeks and rivers.

[04:30]

and oceans. And then it occurred to me that there's a way in which the sound of the creek fills the whole universe. So the sound of the creek on these distant planets is really the sound of our creek. Or maybe what we're hearing is the sound of the creek on those distant planets. There's a kind of way of hearing the sound of the creek which is not separate, is not local.

[05:32]

is universal. And the same can be said of things that we see or things that we smell or touch. When you're deeply present, it can happen that when you smell something, that fills the whole universe. So I enjoyed these quiet, spacious reflections. One of the things that drew me into Zen was poetry.

[06:40]

Short little verses that celebrate the sound of a bird, or the sound of water, or the rising of the sun. They all seem to be celebrations of the natural world. And maybe these verses spoke to me of an enjoyment that I could have. I had been practicing for a while when I came across a poem which probably is the one that most often ranks as my favorite. So it's my favorite among favorites. And I would like to share it with you. It's only four lines long. So you might even memorize it.

[07:46]

It's called Wet Evening in April. And it's written by Patrick Cavanagh, an Irish poet. And he says, the birds sang in the wet trees And as I listened to them, it was a hundred years from now, and I was dead. And someone else was listening to them. But I was glad that I had recorded for him the melancholy. That last line doesn't rest too well with me. I kind of think maybe record the tranquility. or the beauty, or the poignancy. We're living a life knowing that we are just passing through, like the waters of the creek.

[08:53]

And the sound that we make is just as beautiful and just as wide. It reaches into the distant future and into the distant past. We draw a boundary around ourselves. We draw a lifespan around ourselves. We draw many lines around ourselves in order to define ourself. I am this and I am not that. I am not this, I am that. In so doing, we confine our life to those definitions.

[10:00]

And we become uncomfortable when we begin to think that reality does not agree with those definitions. when it does not concur with them, when we have to revise them, change them, when we have to become a new self. So poetry was one of the things that drew me to Zen practice. But I think more significantly than that was the teaching of the Buddha. And maybe just as significantly as poetry was a sense of the Zen aesthetic.

[11:10]

But if I didn't have the teachings of the Buddha, a working knowledge of them, I think the aesthetic would have perhaps driven me away. Because there's a certain appearance in Zen practice. The appearance of religion. All these robes and rituals, even when I came to it, reminded me a lot of Catholicism. The Catholicism that I had given up years before I came across Buddhism. And so I may have just dismissed it. But having an understanding or at least a working knowledge of the Buddhist teachings led me to think that there was something deeper going on. The first zendo, or the second zendo that I came into was Gringolch.

[12:17]

And I just love the aesthetic, the lines, the sense of order, the sense of space. The first sendo that I went into, and I had forgotten about this, but the first sendo was in a place called Thrustle Hole in North England. And Thrustle Hole is in the lineage of Shasta Abbey. And for chanting, they played an electric organ, and they had stained glass windows, whereas you were expected to address them as reverent. I didn't take to it so much. So in Zen practice, we put a lot of emphasis on being present. And in the yoga classes that we've been doing, I am really happy to hear Sherry saying, come back to what you are experiencing.

[13:34]

Same teaching as in Zen. Come back to what is happening. Our mind tends to fly off. into the future or into the past. Because these are the places where the fun and tragedies are. These are the places where the stories are. Stories about me and you and selves. Quite often the present can be boring. I think I'm supposed to give a boring talk just to make it a little bit difficult for you. I've been at a lot of boring talks, and they're great. They're really great for practice. There's nothing else to do except be present.

[14:40]

Nothing else works. You can't really escape. So I came up in one of our discussions that practice is a little bit like creating I use the image of a cage and Susan suggested that the image of a container would be better and container is quite often used we have forms how to enter into the zendo what not to do when you're in the zendo how to take your seat, how not to take your seat, where you should sit, where you should not sit. And at the beginning, this can seem like just, why so many rules? But as you become familiar with the rules, they form a structure which allow you to be present.

[15:48]

You know what to do and when to do it. they bring you back to the present. If you cross the threshold of the doorway with the wrong foot, nobody in this lineage, I hope, is going to hit you with a stick. But you will know that you did it, and so you're brought back to what it is that you're doing. You're continually encouraged not to be absent-minded, not to just dawdle through life, but to pay attention to what you're doing, to be present with what you're doing. Part of being present is becoming comfortable with the discomfort. When you sit zazen,

[16:54]

Twenty minutes at the beginning may seem like a long time. That's how much discomfort there is in it. And you soon realize it's not simply a physical thing. There's quite a significant mental component in the discomfort. There's also a physical component, but there's a significant mental component. And so learning how to sit still for 25 minutes, 30 minutes, 50 minutes, three hours, that is as much a physical negotiation, or I should say as much a mental negotiation as it is a physical one. As we... become comfortable or accepting of the discomfort.

[17:57]

We're entering into the present moment. We're not trying to escape it. We're working with trying to accept it. And our ability to accept it grows. Normally, we try to escape. discomfort. And we fly off into the future, into a fantasy. And it's this kind of flight that I think made me think the cage was a good image. Quite often they put little birds in cages and they can fly around but they can't fly out. So being present is kind of imposing a limitation on ourself. I also like the cage because you can see out of it.

[19:05]

You can see the places where you can't go. You can feel the draw of other places. So why would we want to be present? What difference does it make? Hopefully I remember that because I want to say when we're doing yoga we're often asked to put ourselves into a uncomfortable position and to extend ourselves so that Maybe it actually is a little bit uncomfortable. I mean, we can do all these exercises in such a way that it's perfectly comfortable. But even then, when you're asked to hold it, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable.

[20:14]

And then you breathe into that discomfort. You accept that discomfort. And Sherry says, come back to your experience When it's uncomfortable, I have no choice what I can do. I can start fantasizing my way out of the experience. So what was that question? I think I actually did forget the question that I had before I made that comment. Yes. Why be present? Thank you. My take on that is we kind of rumble our way through life and there's a wonderful cartoon.

[21:29]

I don't know I think I saw it pinned on a Zen Center bulletin board, but I don't know where it originated from. You see this guy in an office, and while he's in the office, he's thinking of playing golf. So it's like a bubble. You see what he's thinking. And when he's playing golf, he's thinking of a traffic jam on the way home. And when he's in the traffic jam on the way home, he's thinking of watching a movie. And when he's watching the movie, he's thinking of making love. And when he's making love, he's thinking of the office. And that is somewhat how we live our lives. when we're doing something, we're thinking about what we're going to be doing later, tomorrow, next week.

[22:35]

Or we're thinking about something that has gone on in the past, something that was more interesting than this, but when we were doing it, we were thinking of something else. And if only I'd been present for it, okay. And so this is why we need to be present, because when we are present, we actually get to have the life that we're living. We get to have our life. We did an interesting experiment for dinner. Well, for the afternoon, we are in silence and I've just given up my part of the bargain. But the yoga group decided that we would try and be silent from 4.30 through the end of the day. So it was really interesting watching how people had dinner. When we first came to the table, there was no silence denoted for the table.

[23:44]

I found out earlier that we don't do that at Tesahara anymore. Maybe I found out wrong, but that's what I found out. So we sat down and I suggested to people that we don't be too rigid about being in silence, but because other people may want to practice in silence, that we don't actually initiate a conversation. Whereas if they initiate it, we can assume that they need to talk. So we would respond. So we sat down for dinner and we were having dinner. turned out to be in silence. And to see that people seemed to be more present, there's a certain amount of excitability that wasn't there. Just noticing what the food tastes like, what the liquids taste like,

[24:50]

And for me, noticing, I'm happy to say, I was able to notice the sound of the creek, even though there was a similar sound going on around me at the other tables. So silence can be a way of coming more into the present. And in yoga class, we have the teacher continually bringing us back. In zazen, you have to do that yourself. For zazen, during the yoga retreat, I can do it to some extent. I invite you to be present once or twice during a period of zazen. But my voice and Sherry's voice are really just training wheels. it really has to start coming from yourself, your own effort to be present.

[25:58]

So I say that we ought to be present, or it's a good idea to be present because we get to have our life. We draw these lines around us, these definitions. We define ourselves. And we also habituate very quickly to what is going on. Eating is easy. Why have that experience? I've had it before. So I can start fantasizing about some other experience that I might be having later on. Or talking about some experience that I had in the past. not really fully having this experience of eating. And so we miss our life because we think it should be better than it is.

[27:03]

And if we gave our attention to it, it would be better than it is. It would be whole and complete. Quite often when we're being present, difficulties can arise. Emotional difficulties can arise. And that can be maybe some unfinished business that we didn't fully live through when it was happening. Or it can also be something that's simply a distraction from being present. I remember my nephew, when he was about five or six, being asked to do something by my sister, and I don't think he wanted to do it.

[28:08]

So then she spoke to him a little bit more sternly, telling him to do it. And then he started to cry, saying, you hurt my finger. I was really, I was taking it back. But it was true. Last week. Right? He'd gotten over it. And it was all okay. And he was playing sense. He didn't need to go to a doctor or anything. She had cut his finger almost, she cut his finger in the door, but not to the extent where it was damaged and where he needed medical attention. But still, the pain of having to do something that I didn't want to do meant that my way out of it was to refer to a pain that had happened in the past. And we can be like that. We're sitting there on our cushion.

[29:14]

Painful memories can come up. And it can be because... This present moment stuff is kind of boring. There's a resistance to being present, so let's take on a distraction. It can be a fantasy about something that I'd rather be doing, or it can be a painful memory. Well, the painful memory may actually be that there was grief there that we didn't fully digest. And now our mind is saying, you know, Ingen, There's enough space here to revisit this. So when we're being present, we're present for whatever arises. And we're present as best we can. If happy memories arise, we remain present. Try not to use those memories as a point of departure.

[30:20]

from the present. But to be in the present and letting them, as it were, pass through you. And same with the painful memories. Quite often this kind of thing will happen if you're sitting in a one-day sashin or a seven-day sashin or you're doing a practice period. But it can also happen if you take up a physical practice such as yoga tai chi dance as we give ourselves to a discipline and possibly music and brush painting as we give ourselves to a discipline that requires us to be present painful memories can come up or questions that we have not given attention to can reappear on the horizon.

[31:25]

What is the meaning of life? Is this exercise which is so beautiful, so wonderful, is it actually pointless? Difficult questions can arise. What is it that makes our life meaningful, worthwhile, And I would say continue to be present because they are representing a depth of experience that we have perhaps up to now or up to that moment ignored. And they will give way to deeper levels of experience until eventually the present opens up And you realize that the present moment is not simply a thin slice of time, a thin slice getting thinner as your acuity becomes greater.

[32:44]

Present moment is not simply a thin slice caught between the past and future. The present moment contains everything, past and future. Dogen uses the phrase, birth is an experience, complete this moment. So this moment, the experience is complete. The present moment opens up into a complete experience. It completes. And the reason that that's a good thing is because it's what we really want.

[33:45]

We want to feel as though our life is complete. Entering into the present moment to me is an ongoing deepening of our relationship with impermanence. We enjoy life, but we're also a little bit troubled by it. Impermanence has that effect on us. It can be enjoyable. It can be painful. But it's kind of, whether it's painful or enjoyable, if there's another quality, it's a little bit disconcerting. Because we can never completely, adequately define the self. The definitions have to keep changing, and that's a little bit disconcerting, especially to the self.

[34:52]

So it's a deepening of our relationship with impermanence. And I really like one of the phrases that Sherry uses. She says, resistance gives way to energy. And it can be a little bit like that in I guess all therapies. You might begin to resist them at first, but eventually as the wall of your resistance breaks down, the energy can start to flow. And so we can cultivate this intention and this ability to be present. And although we're resisting it, we can cultivate it.

[36:04]

We're doing a dance with ourself. One side of us wants to say no and the other side of us is saying yes. And gradually as a side of us that's saying yes becomes a majority, then the energy will flow and it's easier to be present. I think that's about it for time. Thank you all very much. I hope to see you all again here sometime sometime.

[36:56]

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