This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to Green Gulch Farm. How many people are here for the first time? How many people have been coming for more than 10 years? About the same. I wanna talk this morning about breakthroughs. Breakthroughs, kind of a bold topic. So a breakthrough is a sudden, dramatic and important

[01:02]

discovery or development. This is the dictionary definition of a breakthrough. And I think Zen practice is all about supporting people to have breakthroughs, to have sudden, dramatic, and important discoveries or developments. And this has become, I think, more and more important in that the times we live in, we live in this age of disruption. We live in a time when there is a tremendous change, climate change, narrow-mindedness, bias, racism, violence, inequality, changes in technology, disruption in our resources. We need some breakthroughs. We need to find breakthroughs in order to solve these incredibly difficult pressing problems.

[02:11]

And this is also a time of spiritual disruption. It's a time when the wisdom teachings are emerging and finding themselves in really strange places like our corporations, and even strange places like our temples and synagogues, where these wisdom teachings are becoming more and more alive. But in politics, in teaching, in schools, we're seeing these wisdom teachings emerge. Yeah, and this has been my life's work, has been devoted to this topic of how to transform myself, how to help influence others, and what can we do to make it a more just, peaceful world for everyone, for us.

[03:27]

for our children and grandchildren, what can we do? What breakthroughs are necessary? I went to the doctor the other day. I had a doctor's appointment. It was someone who I was seeing for the first time. And as he was examining me, he was just making some talk and wanting to find out a little bit more about me. And he said, what do you do in the world? And I said, I'm in the world peace business. And without hesitating, he said, ah, business must be very good. And it's true. And my goal is to put us out of business. But I'm not worried about that. And in fact, You know, even I think we have these visions sometimes of some utopian society.

[04:32]

I've been involved for many years with an organization called A World Without Armies that was started by Kaz Tanahashi, who very connected to the Zen Center. A World Without Armies. And they're intelligent enough to know that even if there were no armies, it would be really difficult here to live, that killing each other is an easy way to solve problems. It's not the best way. It's not a sustainable way. But to actually learn to work with each other, to talk to each other, to love each other, to understand each other, this isn't easy. There'd be a lot of work would need to be done, even if we didn't Well, I want to talk about this connection, this connection from breakthroughs and developing ourselves to have more spiritual disruption, which I think is the real underlying answer to how to solve any of these

[05:53]

what looks like difficult systemic problems, at the base is the human, the human mind, what's here in the human mind, heart, body. My hope, my real aspiration is to make myself into someone who can actually be effective in implementing some kind of change. and wanting all of us to become change makers, influencers, to leave here today with, oh, yes, I am an influencer. I can work on myself. I can influence others to find my own spiritual disruption, my own spiritual breakthroughs. And I want to start by telling a little parable.

[06:54]

And some of you may have heard this parable. It's about three bricklayers. There's these three different people who are each laying bricks. And this is usually a story that's told to illuminate the importance of purpose. But I like this story, I wanna use it for a different reason here. So in this story, someone goes up to the first bricklayer and says, what are you doing? And he says, I'm putting bricks in here, one at a time. And the person goes up to the second bricklayer and says, what are you doing? And he says, I'm supporting my family. this activity supports my family. And then this person goes up to the third bricklayer and says, and what are you doing?

[07:55]

And he says, I'm creating the ability for people to connect with God. I'm building a church. So you have these three bricklayers all on the outside appear to be doing exactly the same thing, right? Each one of them is laying bricks. But each one of them has a completely different understanding of what it is they're doing in the world. And often, when I first heard this story, it was told in such a way as though, oh, it was really the real juice, what we should really be paying attention to is this third juice. because isn't that really the most important thing, this connection with God, and it's very wonderful, and I think our attention is really drawn there.

[09:00]

But the more I've thought about this story, I keep coming back to, actually, what about the other bricklayers? And in fact, if I were the supervisor, of these three bricklayers, and I said, what are you doing? And this third one said, oh, I'm making connections with God. I might be tempted to give him a bad review. But actually, stepping back, I want to talk a little bit about how the importance of looking at what it is we're actually doing and the ability the ability to see what we're doing from a multitude of perspectives. So let's look at this first bricklayer who says, well, I'm laying bricks. This bricklayer is paying attention. This is the bricklayer that's playing in the arena of carefully noticing what she or he is doing, paying attention.

[10:12]

paying attention one brick at a time, being present. Again, a little bit like here in the kitchens, we teach when you're chopping carrots, chop carrots. And a part of meditation practice is training the mind to be present, training the mind to just be doing what it is you're doing. Some of you may have read some of the recent studies that show that the average American, their mind is wandering 47% of the time. Some of you have probably seen this study. And it turns out that when someone's mind is wandering, they're generally not happy. When we're not focused on what we're doing, we're usually ruminating or worrying about So there's actually some importance, some power for ourselves, but also in whatever we're doing, right?

[11:19]

We want to be trained. We want to be able to train our minds to pay attention to what it is we're doing. And there's interesting studies about neuroplasticity, how we can change our brains by where we put our attention. So this practice... this practice of paying attention and doing what we're doing, I think is a real necessary step toward preparing our minds to have breakthroughs, to be able to focus on what we're doing. But also, there's interesting studies that show that in order to have breakthroughs, we also want to be able to allow our minds to freely wander, but without worrying or ruminating, but just to notice the spaces in between our breaths, to notice the spaces in between our thoughts, to not constantly be carried away either by our wandering minds, and to not always have to be focused on something, but to have a supple, flexible mind, readiness of mind.

[12:32]

And again, I think this core practice that's done right here in this hall is training our mind both to be focused and supple at the same time, flexible. So this practice of zazen, meditation, is training the mind to be really good as the first bricklayer. The second bricklayer says, his explanation for what she or he is doing is supporting, I'm supporting my family. I see this as I'm doing this because of my relationship I have with other people. I'm in relationship. Not only am I supporting my family, this is my place in my community. I'm supporting my family, I'm supporting my community. I have some relationship. I'm wanting to understand the needs of others.

[13:34]

I'm wanting to feel the feelings of others. I'm wanting to practice empathy. And even taking it further, I think this brick layer is, to me, the representative of empathy and compassion. I'm doing this to help relieve the suffering of others. And it might be because my family needs this, but also creating this building. This building is there also to relieve the suffering of others. And this is a core practice in Zen is from the perspective of no separation, no separation between ourselves and others. So this would be the breakthrough of the second brick layer is that we are intimately connected, right? That though even with compassion, you know,

[14:35]

The definition of compassion is wanting to... is feeling the feelings of others and wanting to bring more understanding and to relieve suffering. But to really do this effectively, we need to embody connection. We need to embody that we are not separate from other beings. It's not about I'm helping you. It's that we are... that I'm seeing similarities. So this is a core practice of the second bricklayer, is the practice of seeing similarities and offering kindness. And the third bricklayer, this is the bricklayer who is helping people to connect with God.

[15:36]

He's there with this sense of building a cathedral. And in a way, I think this is, all three of these practices are so essential, right? The first brick layer, paying attention. Where is your attention? Being able to pay attention and open your attention. of connection, relationship, not seeing separation. And the third, meaning and purpose. Why am I here? What is really the most important thing? To really be able to drop down into what's really important to me? What's really important to you? as a human being.

[16:37]

I once, this was several years ago, I was hired to help facilitate a part of a retreat that was actually happening here at Green Gulch. It was a group of CEOs, leaders of some large companies from all around the world were here for three days working on working on strategy for a nonprofit they were all on the board of. So this was this nonprofit board, CEOs trying to figure out strategy in three days. And I was supposed to come in right in the middle, like after the first day and a half, they wanted me to do a few hour session with them. And this was actually right over in the Wheelwright Center. And I remember distinctly, as I was walking in, one of the CEOs met me and pulled me aside and said, this three day retreat is not going very well.

[17:40]

We just fired the last facilitator. Welcome. And I remember walking in and feeling, there are about 16 people in the room and I could feel the tension. And I thought, well, what am I going to do here? And I thought, well, I'll start with what I do best. I said, let's sit some meditation. And as I said that, I noticed there were maybe three or four women who kind of leapt to the front, were really excited to stop the, there was so much tension. The idea of just sitting was really attractive. And then there were another group of people that seemed interested. And then in the back, there were three or four men who were very skeptical about Why are we, this is a waste of time. I thought we were here to do strategy. So we sat for a few minutes and I talked a little bit about things like opening your heart and being present and generosity.

[18:43]

And then I then got these 16 CEOs into small groups, groups of fours. And I said I wanted each of them to have three or four minutes to talk about to answer a few questions. And the questions that I suggested that they answer were, one, why are you here on the planet? Two, how are you doing? And three, what action might you take in your answer to the first two questions? And I was a little surprised how deeply they each of these groups really, really entered these questions. I was going around listening and I could see there were tears in several groups as people were answering these questions about purpose and meaning. And when we came back to the room together, it just felt totally different.

[19:46]

The feeling in the room was completely different than it had been before. And a few people raised their hands and said, this is what was missing from their retreat, that they were trying to solve a problem without stopping and without connecting at a heartfelt level. And I heard that the rest of the strategy session went quite well. So it can be really hard, and I noticed this too in my current leadership role, it can be hard to stop. and take the time just to stop and breathe and notice that you're alive with other people, and time to connect with others. I now, and I'll talk a little bit about this at the end of my talk, about my current role, but I now, in the meetings that I'm, if I'm facilitating or leading a meeting, this is how I'll always start, with a few minutes of quiet and a few minutes of connection, a few minutes of

[20:55]

heartfelt connection when possible. So this is the third brick layer. And so in each of these, each of these has their own kind of set up or influence about breakthrough. So to me, actually, in this meeting that I just described, this was a breakthrough for I think for all of us to see that in order to get something done, the importance of stopping. And that in a sense, if you want to have this connection with God, this connection with some larger idea, is much more than just an idea. How can we embody it? How can we bring that into our day-to-day connection with ourselves and with each other. And the Buddha, the historical Buddha, 2,500 years ago, I think his breakthrough was the Four Noble Truths.

[22:08]

After tremendous amount of effort and tremendous amount of quiet and tremendous amount, I think, of talking to other people and having heartfelt conversations, the Buddha came to the breakthrough idea, which is the underpinnings of all of Buddhism and all of Zen, which is that suffering and difficulty, old age sickness and death are part of the human condition. But that suffering, real suffering is caused by clinging by clinging and by aversion, by kind of wanting things that we can't have and pushing away things that we do have. And that there is a way to find real freedom, that freedom is possible. This was a huge breakthrough idea, that we could actually find freedom, and that the path to freedom is to practice what...

[23:21]

the historical Buddha called the Eightfold Path, which includes things like right view, right livelihood, right speech, right action. So in a way, this work of bringing these wisdom teachings into the world has been kind of my own breakthrough idea And now I feel like it's a world breakthrough idea that we're all sharing it. And there's a tremendous amount of resistance at every level. I heard on the radio the other day that the National Consumer Products Association had a big meeting recently. And they were really getting upset that people are buying less products

[24:21]

packaged goods. People are reading ingredients and not wanting to put chemicals and poisons in their body. They're like, what should we do about this problem? But I think they're slowly coming around to, oh, I think we might need to make healthier foods. People are waking up to what they're putting in their bodies, little by little. So I think for me the breakthrough idea of this story about the three bricklayers is that we need to do all three of these things. We need to focus our attention, widen our attention, we need to build our empathy and compassion, and we need to work from a place of deep connection and deep meaning.

[25:22]

And there's some really interesting models out there that you may want to study, you may want to know more about. And in some way, this work of bringing these wisdom teachings, contemplative practices, into the world has been happening now for some time and is really suddenly bubbling up into our culture in a big way. Yeah, you can take a look at the work of Michael Ray, who wrote a book called Creativity in Business, which was the most popular course at Stanford Graduate Business School some time ago. And there, in his work, he talks about, in order to have creative breakthroughs, we need to believe in our own creativity. We need to quiet our voice of judgment

[26:28]

So this is a big one, quieting the voice of judgment. And we need to pay attention to details and we need to have the courage to ask difficult questions. Difficult, dumb, what he calls even dumb questions. The dumb questions of Zen are, why are we here? What is consciousness? What does it mean to be a human being? What are you all doing here? How did you all end up here? What decisions in your life led you to be here right now? What are all the decision points that led you to be here? And while you perhaps are thinking of that question, do you notice that you're breathing? Do you notice your body? Can you right now practice

[27:30]

these three practices, paying attention, wishing everyone here well. If you haven't done it, you might just kind of notice. There's a lot of beautiful human beings here. And can you, even without them knowing it, can you say to yourself, may you each be happy, may you be happy. You know, may you be happy. This is, can you train your mind in more wisdom, more compassion? And then I've been watching these last couple of days a talk by a professor, consultant at MIT named Otto Scharmer, who his model of breakthroughs is what he calls Theory U. And in this Theory U model, it's interesting, it's, you know, I think he, it's actually brilliant work and I shouldn't say that he stole it from the three bricklayers.

[28:42]

But it's the work of, you know, it's the steps of, the first step in his model is observe, observe, observe, pay attention. And then this U is like, be quiet. allow your natural inner wisdom to emerge, and then the upside of the you is take action. Take action, and he calls it reinventing the future. Reinventing the future. So I think it's, again, a beautiful model. And the model that I'm most involved in these days is I'm currently running an organization called the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, S-I-Y-L-I. And when you look at it, people say, oh, it looks like silly. So we've totally embraced the silliness of it. So I'm the CEO of silly.

[29:45]

Yeah, and actually, I describe myself as a, I'm a stealth priest. living in the world. And it's really nice to put my robes on here. I appreciate putting my robes on. Actually, someone once asked me, when do you put your robes on? You're a Zen priest. I said, well, actually, they're always on, but you just don't see them. And that's my intent. That's my aspiration. They wouldn't let me into Google or SAP looking like this, but... or people would think it was religious. But actually, what I love about these teachings is that they have religious roots, but they lend themselves so well to the secular world, to the world of whether it's work or healthcare or politics or education. I think these are powerful teachings.

[30:54]

The Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute uses the framework of mindfulness-based emotional intelligence. So it uses emotional intelligence as a framework, but brings in the attention training, the mindfulness piece, and aims these at leadership, at helping people in all walks of life to be better influencers, game changers, to help these leaders to hopefully, little by little, begin to make shifts in solving some of these great problems that I mentioned in the beginning of my talk. And the mission and vision of this organization, of SILI, is all leaders in the world are wise and compassionate, thus creating the conditions for world peace. So to work all leaders in the world, trying to touch leaders, and we're all leaders.

[32:03]

If we're not leaders now, maybe we were, maybe we will be. We lead our own lives, we influence so many people, no matter what we do, and in so many ways, whether we're driving our car, or going to the doctor's office, or whatever we do. we influence, we have the ability to influence. My hope is that you will somehow find the confidence, the confidence it takes to step into this role, this daunting role of being a change, Again, starting with ourselves. And in Zen, it's starting with each breath, that we can be changed in each breath. I want to read just a short passage from, this is a book called, again, I hope,

[33:17]

Most of you know this, called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. It was a collection of lectures by Suzuki Roshi, who was the founder of these temples, of this temple, the San Francisco Zen Center in the city, and Tassajara, the San Francisco Zen Center places. These were from some collection of talks that he gave in of the late 60s and very early 70s. He died in 1971. Every existence in nature, every existence in the human world, every cultural work that we create is something which was given or is being given to us. But as everything is originally one, we are in actuality giving out everything.

[34:20]

This is quite the turn, right? I love how I think we can get that first part, right? That every existence in human world, every cultural work that we create is something which was given, right? We were given these bodies, these minds, these hearts. It's all been given to us. But then the next line, But as everything is originally one, we are in actuality giving out everything. If we could just embody that. Moment after moment we are creating something and this is the joy of life, of our life. But this I which is creating and always giving out something is not the small I, it is the big I. Even though you do not realize the oneness of this big I with everything, you give something. When you give something, you feel good.

[35:22]

Because at that time, you feel at one with what you are giving. And we should not forget day by day. Oh, I'm sorry, let me start that again. And we should forget. And we should forget. It's fine. Another breakthrough right here in front of your very eyes, reading Suzuki Roshi. And we should forget, day by day, what we have done. This is true non-attachment. And we should do something new. To do something new, of course, we must know our past. And this is all right. But we should not keep holding on to anything we have done. We should only reflect on it. So he's talking about how to have breakthroughs. Forget what you've done day by day, but don't forget your past. And we must have some idea of what we should do in the future.

[36:28]

But the future is the future, the past is the past. Now we should work on something new. Now we should work on something new. This is our attitude and how we should live in the world. So to do something through and through is to resume our true activity of creation. This is why we sit. This is why we do meditation practice. If we do not forget this point, everything will be carried on beautifully. But once we forget this point, the world will be filled with confusion. So the world is filled with confusion because this point keeps being forgotten, this point that we've been given everything, and that everything we do has the possibility of being a breakthrough, of being new, of being with real wisdom and compassion.

[37:38]

It's hard. It's hard work. It's really hard work. But what else is there to do? I was thinking of a... As I was walking over here, I noticed in the Wheelwright Center, it said Google is meeting here today. I don't know what part of who from Google is here, I used to teach quite a bit at Google, and I still do occasionally. And I was remembering, this was a few years ago, I was driving to Google to teach a Search Inside Yourself program. Actually, this was gonna be sort of a day long, kind of a day long day of mindfulness. with about 50 Google engineers.

[38:45]

And as I was driving from my home in Mill Valley to Google in Mountain View, I noticed I was getting more and more anxious. All I could think about was remembering that at the end of the program they were all going to rate me from one to five. And though in the past I had gotten mostly good ratings, there's always someone who doesn't like me there. how could that be? And I would notice when I would see the evaluations, my mind would go right to the person who gave me the three or the two. And of course, I'd immediately think, oh, they're never going to have me back here again. My life is over. Even though there might have been lots of good grades. And I was getting more and more worked up. And actually, I put in this CD from the poet David White and his booming English voice talking about living on the edge and letting go of your ideas and just being present.

[39:58]

And I started to get more and more kind of filled up with this sense of confidence and possibility. And when I thought about these people at Google rating me, I said, who cares? I don't want to say what I really said to myself. And I walked into this class, and I was co-teaching with my, actually, person who's now my partner in crime, Meng, whose title is the Jolly Good Fellow of Google. Right, so I'm the CEO of Silly, and I work with the Jolly Good Fellow. It's a pretty good deal. We were co-teaching together, and after the first break, he stopped and Meng looked at me and said, what happened to you? He said, you're usually pretty confident, but wow, you were really confident today. And I felt the confidence of letting go, of being judged by others, and just, I think, as...

[41:06]

as Suzuki Rishi was saying, just to step into something new. So to me, this was new. Just be present. Just be present for teaching wisdom and compassion practices, and I'm getting all worked up about my ego and my judgment of myself. So this is hard work, but it's really good work. And my hope is that we can all do this together, that this isn't work that we can do alone, that we need each other's support. I was thinking about Bob Dylan and blowing in the wind, but I was listening on the way here to Bob Dylan, and it's just beautiful, right? How many times must the cannonballs fly before they're forever banned. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

[42:12]

Yeah, so I think the answer is blowing in the wind, and we just need to be both quiet enough and alive enough to hear it. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:03]

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