Good morning, everyone. Good morning. How's the sound? Good. Off to a good start today. So how many of you are new here for the first time? Oh, it's a nice group of new people. Welcome. We don't have question and answer today, right, because of the Sashin? Okay, so we're in a one-day sitting, so I think it's a little bit more of an abbreviated question. but I hope you come back some other time when we can have lunch together and do other things.

[01:00]

Zen practice is a matter of being present with our lives. Zen practice is a matter of being present with our lives. That's not the first time you've heard that sentence. I'm sure there's about 150 books written about Be Here Now. be present. But, in fact, that is what our practice is. I'm going to talk a little bit about that. This works whether you're doing Zen practice or anything. After I spent 10 years at Zen Center when I was young, I became an executive in the microcomputer software field. For those of you who are familiar with business or the world in general, basically it's just one continuous stream of problems. One problem after another. And I realized after a while my motto was just show up.

[02:12]

Just show up. Just get up in the morning and go to the office and be there as this stream of problems came along. And even though many times the problems seemed absolutely insurmountable, if you brought yourself to it, if you could be there in the present, solutions would emerge, the direction to go would come up. It may not have been the direction you thought about the previous night or anything, but so just show up. I was thinking of labeling this talk, just show up, but I'm not sure yet. We'll see what direction it takes. But anyway, certainly as I go through the day, my days, and I'm sure it may be the case for you, there are many times when you're not engaged and present. You know, you're distracted, you're lost in a world in your mind. Sikiroshi used to say, we lose ourselves.

[03:17]

We lost ourselves. You know, all of a sudden you'll say, where was I? You know, you can even be driving along in a car and you'll have driven a mile or two. Magically, your body seems to be smart enough to drive without you being present, which is a thankful thing. But anyway, so this is... And a lot of times what we get, we get lost because of some problem or some difficulty we're trying to solve. Either we didn't do something very well, so we're... thinking about how we could have done it better, throwing a little bit of giving ourselves a hard time about how big a failure we are. You can lose minutes on that one. Or somebody else didn't treat us well, and we're angry at them, and they're bad, and so we can lose a few more minutes on that, and this goes on. So this cycle of thinking that takes us out of being present... can be just sort of a minor activity that's going on in our day or actually can become a major issue.

[04:26]

We can be caught in a grip of a complex where we're just so taken up by these issues that we don't even know where we are anymore. And these compulsive thoughts come up, repetitive patterns. So the question is, how do you pull yourself out of it? And that's what we're going to talk about today a little bit. We're sitting a sashin today, so those people that are sitting the one day sitting are going to get a good chance to pay attention to this, first to notice when they're not present, and to think about how to bring themselves back into the present. Suzuki Roshi used to say, even in zazen you will lose yourself. When you become sleepy or when your mind starts to wander about, you lose yourself. When your legs become painful, you say, why are my legs so painful? and you lose yourself. Because you lose yourself, your problem will be a problem for yourself. If you do not lose yourself, even though you have difficulty, there is no problem whatsoever.

[05:31]

So the distinction he's making is not that you won't have problems, but if you're present with your problems, they're just a difficulty, they're not really a problem. He sort of ends that little paragraph with, when your life is always a part of your surroundings, in other words, when you are called back to yourself in the present moment, then there is no problem. When your life is always part of your surroundings. When we lose ourselves, we don't even know where we are. We're not in touch with our body. Our body is busy paying attention to the world and doing lots of things, but we're not present with that. We're not located in space anywhere. We're lost somewhere in a dream world in our head. But when we can come back to our surroundings and relate to our surroundings, then in that present moment you have great resources.

[06:34]

So, I'm going to share a famous story that is related to this problem. It's one of the... really well-known koans in our collection. It's Case 12 in The Gateless Barrier. It's called Ru Yan. Ri Yan Calls Master. So Ri Yan was a very famous Zen master, and apparently his practice was to do the following. He would say to himself, Master? He was a Zen master. That's why I guess he referred to himself as Master. And he would answer, Yes. I'm here. Then he would say, be aware. And he would say, yes, I'll be aware. Then he would say, don't be fooled by anything. And then he would say, no, I won't. That was his practice.

[07:40]

Somebody said he would sit on a stone in the morning and say, master, yes. Be aware. Yes. Don't be fooled by anything. No, I won't. Great way to start a day, don't you think? And some of the written commentary on it, they said that was pretty much what his lectures were. Which occurred to me that that would make preparing lectures much easier than they are. But in some sense, it's kind of true. I mean, like all of Zen might be summarized in those three little things. But before I get into that, I just want to say, we're generally always talking to ourselves.

[08:44]

I mean, we are talking to ourselves a lot. So this is just a kind of a Zen way of talking to yourself. Instead of the normal way you're talking to yourself, like... I'm fantastic, or I'm terrible, or I don't like Bill, or I do like Sam, or whatever it is, you can say, you know, Lydia, yes! Be aware! Yes! Don't be fooled by anything. I won't! So it would be a different way of talking to yourself. So, uh... Of course, the first question that occurs is when you say, Ed, and you go, yes. Well, who's the Ed that's saying Ed, and who's the Ed that's saying yes? Who are we talking to here? Are we talking to Ed, my story about my life, where I was born, where I went to school?

[09:53]

who I'm married to, my wife, my home, my relationships, my career? Is it my body? Is it what my thoughts are at this point in time? Who is it that we're talking to here? Is it the current problem I'm involved in? A lot of times you're so involved in a problem that your whole world is this problem. Very interesting question. Who it is that's here? Who it is that's here saying, yes, I'm here? Entire koan in itself. Unfortunately, many of the times when you're supposedly here, you're a very small person involved in a problem. Suzuki Roshi used to say, and I love this saying of his, I think I repeat it to myself about once a week just to try to figure out what it is or remind myself, he used to say, sometimes I think, you think, your problems are more important than the fact that you are alive.

[11:13]

I'm going to repeat that again. Sometimes I think, you think, your problems are more important than the fact that you are alive. You get it? Do you ever think that? Yeah. So whatever problems we have are problems of limitation we have imposed on ourselves. When we're in one of those problems, we've shrunk ourselves down to this, at least, maybe even smaller than that, but five-foot, six-inch person who's... got a personality defect that's trying to solve this problem about their relationship with so-and-so and actually we're kind of depressed about it or moody. We're living in this extremely small world that's been defined by our mind and we're captured by it. But we all know we're much bigger than that.

[12:19]

I mean, if nothing else, you've totally ignored the fact that you're a human being that's living and breathing. And even though you're not aware of it, it's relating to the environment, tracking noises that are going outside. You may be so involved in your problem, you're not even aware of the fact that you're about to walk across the street and be run over, but your body sort of stops and says, did you hear that truck? I mean, you know, so this... The problem we have where we shrink our life to this very small thing and lose the vastness of it raises the question of when we say, Ed, and we go, yes, are we saying yes from the shrunken Ed or are we saying yes from the vast, large Ed? And so that's the first question. And the problem is that it's both.

[13:22]

I mean, this vastness that you are... Well, let me just sort of stop there a little bit. Does anybody have a sense of what I'm talking about when I say that you're vast? You're undefinable? You know, you could have... large descriptions of who you are and what you are, but nothing you would describe would get close to talking about what it is to be you, a human being, living in this world at this moment in time. It's huge. It's enormous. It's immeasurable. That's your life, not the little... idea you have about who you are at any given point. But it's actually both because this vastness that we're talking about only is realized in the particularities of your actual life.

[14:31]

Each one of you is a particular person born in a particular place in a particular time raised by particular parents with a karmic personality and a whole bunch of relationships you have, and it is in that particular life that your vastness is expressed, nowhere else. So you have to take care of that, all the particularities of your life. You have to take care of yourself. You have to pay attention to how you brush your teeth, how you wash your face. how you walk down the street, how you relate to your friends. All of these things are particular things that you have to take care of. But you don't want to forget, in the midst of taking care of all these things, these particularities of your life, how vast you are. You don't want to limit your capacity by thinking that you aren't bigger than all those things.

[15:40]

So that's the first thing. Lydia? Yes. So the question is, who is that person that's saying yes? And the next thing that occurs in this little dialogue, the next part of this description of Zen practice is be aware. What is this being awareness about? Be awake. Be awake. Be awake means not to be lost in our dream world. Once during a sashin, I don't think it was a one-day sitting like this, I think it was a seven-day sashin. I was... having a difficult time.

[16:58]

I was having some physical pain. I was having some mental pain. And I was not being very successful with dealing with it. So then I decided to compound the problem by telling myself that I was a lousy Zen student. I was hopeless. And I really got myself into a state. And I was having a practice discussion with a friend. So I went in and described all this to him. And he said, gosh, Ed, you know, if anybody else treated you as badly as you're treating yourself right now, you wouldn't put up with it for a second. I mean, really, you wouldn't. I agree. So he said, stop it. Has anybody ever seen that Bob Newhart six-minute film on his therapy session where he says, stop it?

[17:59]

Fantastic. That was his entire therapy practice. You paid him a dollar a minute for the first five minutes and nothing after that because his therapy never lasted more than five minutes. But the interesting thing was, for some reason, I was aware enough about how caught up I had been in that process. and especially when my friend so clearly pointed it out that it was just completely wrong, that the awareness of it, I stopped it. I mean, just being aware, just seeing how crazy I was, I was able to cut through it and stop it. And that particular kind of cycle of things that obviously came from some early... childhood pathogenic belief that I have, has never had the same grip on me since then, because it'll come up and I'll see it.

[19:09]

This is the power of awareness. If you can just bring yourself into the present moment and see what your mind is doing, just the seeing can liberate you, can free you. from what's going on. It doesn't mean that about a week later the same thing will come up and it'll take you a while to see it again, but there's a great power in awareness of what's happening. So then the third part of this is don't be fooled by anything. No, I won't be fooled. Ed, don't be fooled by anything. No, I won't be fooled. Actually, one of the early translations, I think, is don't be deceived by others.

[20:13]

And that's pretty good, too. I mean, a lot of times we get pushed around by what other people are telling us we should be doing, or we imagine what they think we should be doing, or what our father thought we should be doing, or what our country thinks we should be doing. So don't be deceived by others is... pretty good. Part of Zen practice is standing on your own two feet, paying attention to your own life and starting to realize that this is your unique responsibility and you have to take care of that yourself. But the other side is don't be fooled. What I like about the don't be fooled by anything is what I was referring to earlier, a lot of times we're fooling ourselves. You know, we're sitting there dreaming up ideas about ourselves and we really need to look carefully and say, you know, I'm just fooling myself. I'm not really, that's not really what's going on.

[21:19]

So, getting back to our wonderful practice of talking to ourselves, first thing, Maybe I should try somebody else. Sagan. Yes. Be aware. Yes. Don't be fooled by anything. Yes. I have friends that actually have taken this practice up, and they tell me it's... I've never really done it thoroughly. They tell me it's very reassuring to talk to yourself that way. You're wandering around some kind of days, and you go... Ed, yes. Wake up. Yes, okay. Don't be so stupid. Okay. Might be an encouraging kind of thing to do. Maybe some of you will take it up a little bit and tell me if you find it better than the other stuff you say to yourself.

[22:25]

But anyway, there's another problem, which is a lot of the times when we're lost, we don't even know we're lost to call out to ourselves and wake up, right? We're just lost, right? So I'm going to address that a little bit. It's not so hard to be present if you're in Hawaii, beautiful sunset, some whales out there spouting, you know, you're with your good friend and you just, I'm here. I'm really here. This is real. This is fantastic. Or I was in Norway two weeks ago with my wife, a wonderful vacation, and we were on these fjords, these marvelous fjords that are carved by the glaciers, the same glaciers that did Yosemite, maybe partly different glaciers because that's Norway. But anyway, the same... Same idea.

[23:33]

Looked the same to me. I mean, they've got these granite walls that rise 4,000 feet out of the ocean water. It's like Yosemite with water in it, basically. And you're taking a boat. And waterfalls just everywhere. And you go, wow, this is magnificent. I'm really here. So that's pretty easy. But, you know, you're at work, you know, and the phone's ringing and somebody's rushing in your office. You've got other problems. It's harder to be here. So Robert Aiken, in his commentary on this case, he wrote a marvelous book on the collection of Mumon Khan Khons. He said, you know, you should set up practices in your life, moments in your life where you're reminded to wake up. or to be present. And it made me think about one of the sort of marvelous inventions of Zen monastic practices.

[24:41]

They have all of these moments. Like if you enter the Zendo at Tassar or Gring Ultra in this building, you're supposed to enter the Zendo on the left side of the door. And if you enter the Zendo on the left side of the door, you're supposed to step through with your left foot. As you all know, there's nothing magical about the left foot, except for if you enter the zendo someday and you enter it with your right foot by accident because you're busy thinking about why your car didn't start that morning and you relate to the zendo or whatever, and you will notice it. It's a funny thing. Something will occur. Well, that was weird. I stepped through with the wrong foot. And because your body... sort of is used to entering this space and always stepping through with the left foot. And when you step through with the right foot, it goes, that's something wrong. It's not God saying you committed a sin.

[25:44]

It's just it's paying attention to the fact that somehow you're so distracted that you haven't stepped through with the right foot. So it's a reminder of being present, reminder of the fact that you're moving from the space of fixing your car to the space of being quiet, being silent. And we need those reminders because sometimes we're so busy we forget. So, of course, in the monastery we have many of these. If you go to the bathhouse, there's a wonderful bath gata that we say. It goes like this, As I bathe this body and mind, I vow with all sentient beings to wash body and mind of all dust and confusion and feel healthy and clean within and without. It's beautiful, isn't it? As I bathe this body and mind, I bow with all sentient beings to wash from body and mind all dust and confusion and feel healthy and clean within and without.

[26:52]

So this little reminder is slightly different than the one we're stepping in to the Zendo because not only is it reminding you that you're going to take a bath, because it's fairly clearly stated, but that in taking this bath, you're going to lift yourself into a healthier, pure person, a mind free of dust and confusion, healthy and clean within and without. So when I was telling you that you... got this vast person that you are and this very tiny person that you are. This is saying, don't forget that you're a vast person, and while you're bathing, let's bring that vast person out, too. So, we have... Many of these, one of my favorites is bowing.

[28:04]

So when you go in the zendo, you bow to your cushion and you turn around and you bow away. That's a real reminder that you're about to sit down in a space and do something and you're not just doing it by yourself, you're doing it with the whole world when you bow away. So, of course, you can make up a lot of these on your own. You don't have to live in a monastery to have these little reminders. You can say the bath gatha when you bathe. And we've got in our bathrooms here in this building, we have them for brushing your teeth and everything, you know, washing your hands. We have little things we can say. You can make up your own. When I was a businessman, I made up ones like before I would pick up a phone. This is back when you used phones. I don't know if any of you still do that anymore. But anyway, back when I was in business, we used phones a lot. And not cell phones, but like regular phones when you're sitting on a desk.

[29:07]

And I would say, I'm here, and I'm about to call somebody, and I'm going to imagine who that person is and where they are. This is back when they used to be sitting in a desk in an office that I visited, not... on a cell phone somewhere. So I would imagine all that. And when I called the phone number and they answered, I actually felt more present and connected with them. Just a simple little, just taking a pause to do that. And I think you could do the same thing before you email or many other daily activities. Does that make sense? Does anybody want to offer an example of something they do in that area that brings them into the present moment automatically as they're going through their day every time they do it?

[30:12]

Yes? That's a wonderful example. And we can also be thankful when gas is put in our car, what an incredible resource that is, and we should use it carefully, and we should thank the dinosaurs for having brought that marvelous energy source to us. Anybody else have one? Sense the body. Put the attention in the body, because mostly the attention for me is in my head. One of my favorite places to do that is standing in line at the Whole Foods store, especially if it's not moving very fast because someone has decided to pay with, God forbid, cash, which they have no idea how to deal with anymore. Of course, then you're always in a hurry and late for a meeting, and you can become agitated.

[31:21]

But then if you just stand there, and pay attention to your body, and remember that you're alive, and wow, what a marvelous place you're in, this entire store filled with marvelous things to eat, and other people getting food, and the person behind you, you can smile at, and they'll smile back and say, yeah, it's taking a long time, and you have a little conversation, before you know it, you're done with. I think that's a great practice. I think the practice of stopping from time to time, and just taking a few breaths. and being thankful that you're alive and feeling your life, your life being, your actual being alive for that moment, for two or three breaths, changes everything. Someone else got one? That's it.

[32:40]

Yeah? I think when you have interaction with someone, to be fully present is the best demonstration of love. Not distract from anything else. Be present with this person. Beautiful. Yeah, it is true. You can't actually connect with another person. You can't actually see another person. You can't actually feel another person unless you're present in your own life. And if you're present in your own life, then in connecting with a person, the natural response is love. Who knew? I mean, you know, that just turned out to be how the world works. Nice, nice, nice way that it works that way. Someone else? Yeah. Dogs.

[33:58]

You could write books. They do write books about that. Anyone that has a dog knows that. I've been driving down the street in the dream world. And I might almost get into an accident or someone will drive in front of me real fast and wake myself up and say, pay attention to the road. Don't think about anything else. One of my good friends, Steve Stuckey, who was a past abbot at Zen Center, used to give courses on Zen and driving. It's a whole world. It is amazing that we get in so few accidents, given how unaware we are when we drive, but it certainly is one of the most dangerous things we do, and it would be a good idea to be paying attention to it.

[35:11]

before somebody honks their horn. Yes? When you're having these repetitive thoughts about someone that you suffer uncomfortable, you feel anger, you breathe in their suffering, and then you exhale their voice. It works. It's an excellent practice. I've done some of that with Tibetan Buddhists. It's not so easy to breathe in other people's suffering. You might as well breathe in. I think that's a good one.

[36:14]

And you get a sort of settledness and you're ready to do the next person. I have a friend that just before hitting the send button on the email, he re-reads the email and thinks about the person he's going to send it to and imagines the person that he's going to send it to as being a Buddha. And then he re-reads the email a second. the second time. He claims he changes the emails frequently. I believe it's probably true. The advanced practice of emailing and texting. Someone should write a book about Zen and the practice of texting. Be a big seller here. Someone else have something to bring forward? I use my Google Calendar alert and I have a daily alert. at 12 p.m., and it has a link to a Tarot Rock five-minute YouTube pause video.

[37:24]

So I get an email at 12 p.m. every day. When I open it, I click on a YouTube link and listen for five minutes to this little meditation. My imagination was that it was a pause thing, and you were just looking at this blank screen for five minutes. That's my Zen thing, you know? Probably you were listening to some nice words that were helpful. I keep hoping somebody would create a screen thing that when you push that thing for five minutes, you just went immediately into some advanced jhanic, somatic state and were there for five minutes and came out. I actually had a friend who thought he was going to do that, but then he got distracted and never did it. Spacing is what he called it.

[38:47]

Not spacing out, but spacing. Yeah. Well. Maybe we should bring this to an end, do you think, and go back to Zasana? Or does somebody else have another? Yes. Yeah, sometimes I think to myself, look... Listen and breathe. It kind of takes me out of those thoughts that I'm having. Look, listen, and breathe. We can make a little an acronym, LLB. But I'm sticking with, you know, our great Zen teacher here. Marsha. Yes. Be aware. Yes. Don't be fooled by anything.

[39:48]

Yes. So as all these little koan stories have, they don't just leave it at that. They always have some little something. So to completely confuse us, so I'm going to read this paragraph. This is the verse that goes with that little koan. Those who search for the way do not realize truth. They only know their old, discriminating consciousness. This is the cause of the endless cycle of birth and death, yet stupid people take it for the original self. Those who search for the way do not realize truth. They only know their old, discriminating consciousness. This is the cause of endless cycles of birth and death. Yet stupid people take it for the original self. I mean, first of all, that's the only way we know anything, is through our old discriminating consciousness.

[40:58]

But we all long for something more than all the discriminating consciousness that separates us. divides us from ourselves and from the world. We long for that sense of connection, that sense of unity with ourselves and with others and with the whole world. And if we bring ourselves into the present moment, if we can be here, we can feel that. We can touch. our connected self, we can get a glimpse of that bigger life that we're leading. And with that, we will change entirely our way of living and being in the world. So, thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[42:08]

Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:31]

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