From Green Gulch Zen Center, and I'm happy to welcome you all to the eighth of nine talks on the meaning of Buddhism in American culture. It's been a pretty good series so far, and tonight's talk I think will really be a pretty culminating moment in that. The final talk in the series is June the 1st, Tuesday night, June the 1st. There'll be a closing session with a number of different speakers. Michael Wenger, Zen Center's president, who put this thing together, told me to mention to you that there'll be a secret mystery speaker, and he wouldn't even tell me who it was, so don't ask me because I don't know. Tonight I am very pleased to be able to announce my friend and teacher, Jack Kornfield.

[01:02]

Jack is a guy who, like they say, needs no introduction. Probably all of you are aware of his teaching, of his books, of his work. He is certainly one of the key Buddhist teachers in the Bay Area, in the country. He's a writer, psychologist, a Vipassana teacher, leader of the men's movement, and an all-around great person, actually. So, tonight he'll talk about something that I think he probably is more able to address than anyone I know, and that is the relationship between Buddhism and psychology. So without saying anything else, I'm very, very happy to introduce Jack Kornfield. Thank you. Thank you, Norm. The trouble with good introductions is then you have to live up to them.

[02:03]

I'll do my best. Good evening, and welcome to this series of talks. I've been asked to address the relationship of Western psychology and Buddhist practice as a part of the series of teachings about Dharma coming to America. Before I start speaking, I'd like to ask, how many of you practice here at Zen Center or are a part of the Zen Center community? Okay, about half. How many of you are involved with CIIS, which I know is a co-sponsor of this? Please. A few, CIIS. And where'd the rest of you come from? How many of you do some other form of Buddhist practice to know? Okay, that's another group. And then the rest of you are in better shape, obviously, than that. My teacher, Ajahn Chah, when he came to visit our center in Massachusetts and teach there,

[03:07]

it was during the long retreat we were giving, and he gave Dharma talks and interviews, and he would wander around. It was in the spring, and people would be out doing walking meditation on the lawns and so forth. And he would kind of walk by people, and then he nudged me at one point, he said, it looks kind of like a hospital here, doesn't it? Or maybe a mental hospital. I said, yeah, there's some of that quality. And so he'd go up to people and he'd say, I hope you get well soon. I hope you get well soon. There's something in that. So my own background and training is having been a monk in the monasteries of Thailand and Burma and India for a number of years, doing intensive retreat training. I did a year-long silent retreat in a room of just sitting and walking for 18 or 20 hours a day. I lived in the forest monasteries where you go out with your bowl for food once a day

[04:07]

and walk 10 miles to some village and they put in whatever food they have and you come back and eat it, share it with others. And studied in that process as well the traditional Buddhist practices of mindfulness and compassion, forgiveness, an exploration of body and mind in different ways. And I had a wonderful training, after which I've returned to this country and over the years have completed a PhD in clinical psychology and gotten married, so I'm a husband and a father, and in some ways a storyteller, which you will hear tonight. And I want to start with a story perhaps by way of using myself as an example of the relationship of Eastern and Western psychology. It's one that's in the new issue of The Inquiring Mind that comes out. It's just come out in the mail in the last not many days. When I first came back from Asia, I was in robes as a monk.

[05:11]

I wanted to see what it would be like to live in 1972 as a Buddhist monk in America, and there weren't very many, and there weren't very many monasteries, not of the Theravada variety or any kind really. So I stayed with my parents, and after some time with my mother and father, I decided to visit my twin brother in New York. So my mother put me on the train to go up from Washington, where I was, and because I was a monk, I was barefoot, and I wasn't handling money, and I was just taking what people put in my begging bowl. So she got me a ticket and put me on the train, and I got off in New York City, and I was to meet my twin brother's wife. She recently had a birthday, and he gave her as a gift a day at Elizabeth Arden, which is facial and hairdo and manicure and massage and stuff like that. It actually sounded kind of pleasant, but anyway, I was to meet her when she was done in front of Elizabeth Arden's. So I got out of the train, and Grand Central Station started to walk up Fifth Avenue, you

[06:17]

know, and I was stoned, basically. I'd been in the forest for some years and meditating all the time, and it was, oh, the Tiffany's was going by and all the traffic, and I was just walking calmly like I was still doing my walking meditation, and it was interesting, and it was okay. Finally I got there, and no one appeared. I waited and waited and waited, so I went in, and the receptionist was surprised. They don't see a lot of Buddhist monks at Elizabeth Arden in those days, anyway. May I help you? So, okay, I'm looking for Mrs. Cornfield. She's not finished yet. There's a waiting lounge on the fourth floor, so I went up, and I sit down. The receptionist there says, may I help you? I said, yes, I'm just waiting for this person, Mrs. Cornfield. Please take a seat. So I sat for a bit, and what else to do? Cross my legs, close my eyes, start to meditate. That's what monks do, right? I mean, I had nothing else to do, and I was kind of sitting there, and after about five or ten minutes, I hear all this noise, people talking and voices, and then this woman yelled

[07:18]

out really loud, is he for real, you know? So I opened my eyes, and there were about ten women wearing Elizabeth Arden nighties, these kind of smocks you wear at Elizabeth Arden for the day, with mud on their faces, and avocado green, and their hair in curlers, and these kind of fishing rod things for different shapes, really wild looking, like out of some African tribe. And I just looked back, and I said, are they for real? We kind of looked at each other. And at that point, I realized that I had to figure out something different than what I was taught in the monastery to survive here, that there was some meeting of cultures that was going to be necessary. So when I returned back after the initial period of five or six years training in Asia, and I've since gone back to those monasteries over a number of years for further training, I've had wonderful meditation experiences, and illuminations, understandings, and visions that came to me.

[08:20]

But as I came back, I discovered all of this unfinished business in my life. And so, one hears in spiritual practice about the development of energy, and the development of awakening as a kind of arising, raising of the kundalini. And I found myself in my spiritual practice actually going down the chakras rather than up the chakras. What happened to me in the beginning is that I spent ten years in the university studying Buddhism, and Chinese, and Asian studies, and then in Peace Corps, and in these monasteries practicing. And I did it mostly with my mind. And I had pretty good power of concentration, and I had lights, and visions, and great kind of openings that happened, and a lot of insight. And then when I came back, and I got a job driving a taxi, and I went to work for a while in a mental hospital.

[09:22]

Maybe it reminded me of the monastery in some way, I'm not sure. I went to graduate school. I got involved in an intimate relationship with this woman I started to live with. And as high as I had been during the time when I returned, I was just in this place of great equanimity and tremendous spaciousness and peace. That's how low that I went. And I discovered that I was kind of, how to put it, emotionally retarded maybe is the best. That after 10 years of inner work with my mind, I came back and found the patterns of my relationships, particularly with women, with family, with work, all the things that make up life, were not really any different than before I left, except for one horrible fact. I could see them more clearly. They were more apparent. And this is so for anybody. I mean, if you go away from the culture, whether it's to go live in India or some monastery

[10:24]

or even go to live at Tassajara or Green Gulch for a certain period of time, and I've done a lot of counseling of monks and nuns, not just Buddhists, but Catholic and other people coming out of monasteries, usually there are parts of us that are just put on hold for that whole period of time. And then when you come back out again, they're there waiting for you. And I have a friend who was a monk, for example, for 25 years and came out, and he was 50 years old when he came out. He went in robes when he was 25 years old. And he was like a 50-year-old, I mean, a 25-year-old in a 50-year-old body. And he was just like this big boy who came out, said, wow, what do we do out here? And it took him a long time to catch up. So I found in myself that I needed to do a lot of work with my heart, work with understanding my patterns in relationship, the fear that underlay a lot of the unfinished business, the pain that I'd never really dealt with from my early childhood, a lot of work with

[11:27]

compassion and loving-kindness meditation and psychotherapy, and gradually, over a succession of initially difficult or disastrous and slightly better and better relationships, learned how to have an intimate relationship. And after that time, then I discovered that, as I went further down the chakras, that not only did I have to include my heart and my emotions, but my body as well was central to practice. And I had used it. I could sit all night without moving in the monastery or sit on the Ganges and go do kind of yogic practices. But in the end, I was using my body rather than inhabiting it in a wise and conscious way. And so then it becomes apparent to me that I have to work to include the way that I sit and walk and how I eat and the actions of my life as much in my spiritual practice as anything else. Buddhism, as it comes to the West, is having a great dialogue with Western philosophy,

[12:36]

with Western science, physics, ecology. But perhaps the most significant dialogue and influence on Buddhism coming to the West so far has been Western psychology, particularly the psychotherapeutic aspect of it. Some people fear this. They're afraid that mixing therapy and meditation will dilute the pristine purity of the Buddha's Dharma and the shunyata, the realization of emptiness. There's no place in that for talking about your mom and dad and your neurotic problems. Others find it helpful to consider the influence between the two because it is great. Let us look in a very honest way at what works and what doesn't. And that's what I'd like to do somewhat tonight. I just came back also from some meetings with the Dalai Lama in India, 22 Buddhist teachers from the West, Zen, Tibetan, Vipassana, all talking together for a week with the Dalai

[13:38]

Lama about the problems and possibilities of Buddhism coming to the West, how to avoid the sectarianism that's rife in Asia. And among the suggestions that came out is what's happening tonight, that we invite one another to teach in each other's centers so that there's some respect for the many forms that Dharma can take. Things that we put up to the Dalai Lama, all the kinds of ethical problems that I'm sure you're aware of happen in any kind of spiritual community. And he said, don't think it's so difficult for you alone. He says, me, Dalai Lama, same problems. He said, my own teachers, my regents who were ruling Tibet for me in India, in Tibet when I was growing up, he said they became power-hungry and starting to fight and called in the Tibetan army and one fighting against the other, he says, terrible. He said, finally I had to denounce my own regents whom I loved, who were my teachers, denounce my regents to the whole country of Tibet. He said, but you must, sometimes you must do this.

[14:41]

Even necessary, put in the papers, he said. Let people know this is the Dharma, this is what's true and beneficial, and this other stuff is not. And the whole meeting was very straightforward and very empowering. When we talked about psychology and psychotherapy and meditation, he said, you must make the changes. You must do this. You are the Westerners and it is you who will find the best way to translate the practice. It was very empowering to all of the participants, particularly ones who were in communities where they were still very much under the Tibetan Lama or the Zen Roshi who had brought it from a different culture. Dalai Lama said, in the end, you cannot listen to your teachers. You must find your own way. So, we want to look very honestly at what meditation and Buddhist practice does for us, and it's then the relationships to psychotherapy and psychology. Tell you a story, a Zen story, if you don't mind.

[15:43]

It's like bringing coals to Newcastle, but there was a Zen monastery, very rigorous training. You got an interview, Dokusan, Sanzen, once every ten years, and you were only allowed to say two words. So this student came in, very, very determined, sat, walked, practiced ten years, finally went in to see the Roshi. It was a tough time. Bowed. Roshi said, how is it going? He said, hard bed. Roshi said, yeah, you know, this is not a bliss trip, Joseph Campbell aside. This is a trip where you really learn a kind of inner renunciation and the ability to go through everything and find your own Buddha nature in the face of difficulties. Just keep practicing. Ten more years passed. Practice, practice. Come back in. Bows to the Roshi, well, how's it going now? Bad food. What do you think? This is a luxury. I mean, the Buddha said that we, practicing, must take whatever is given to us, and it's

[16:46]

to learn to be gracious and accepting of all things that we do this practice and must continue. So he went back ten more years of practice. Finally came in, bowed to Roshi, said, how's it going? I'm leaving. Roshi looked at him and said, I didn't think you'd make it. All you've done since you got here is complain. So what makes us practice? And what makes us leave practice? In a very honest way. The Buddha said, I only teach one thing. I teach suffering and the end of suffering. That's all. Anything else is not what the Buddha teaches. It might be something interesting, but it's not what the Buddha taught. I teach one thing alone, suffering and the release of the, what he called the sure heart's

[17:47]

release, the freedom in our being, the freedom from suffering. And then he taught in the Four Noble Truths, of course, the cause of that suffering, greed, hatred, aggression, delusion, blindness, and a path to the end of it. Now, Western psychology is also based on suffering and its alleviation. Although it started to focus more on the sphere of dysfunction rather than the best possibilities of human beings, it was looking at how unhappy we are and trying to get us to be at least somewhat adjusted to our situation. But both of them share this ground of working with suffering and working with the alleviation of the causes of suffering. Both Western psychology and Buddhism are based on a deep belief in the unconscious forces that work within us. A whole of Western psychotherapy speaks about the kind of habits, unconscious defenses,

[18:56]

inappropriate repetitions that we do over and over again, what we learned in the past. That's what a neurosis is, really, where you learn some strategy to survive in the painful situation of your family or your school or your childhood, and then you keep doing it over and over with everybody else, even though you don't need to. So, Western psychology believes in the unconscious, that there are all these forces going on that we're not so aware of. This is the ground principle as well of Buddhist psychology, that even though you might sit and have a cup of tea or drink a glass of water and everything's peaceful and you say, ah, I'm enlightened in this moment, and you are perhaps, there are roots, as the Buddha said, or habits, patterns of fear, of greed, of aggression, of blindness, that given the right conditions, get touched according to certain causes, and they arise in us and again create our suffering. I'm sure you have all noticed that in your life. Western psychology sees that we repeat our past in unconscious ways.

[20:03]

Buddhist psychology sees that we repeat our past, the past patterns based on ignorance, blindness, as greed, hatred, and delusion, over and over again, in unconscious ways. Now, there are many forms of Western psychotherapy, and when I speak of Western psychology, I'm particularly going to speak of it in the clinical terms, the way people work with one another, not so much the theories of other dimensions of Western psychology. And the earliest methods of psychotherapy were mostly talk therapy, you understand, kind of based on Freud's talking cure. But now there are many, many ways in which Western psychotherapy use to drop below the story, to drop below the thinking mind, to drop below what we normally are aware of, to begin to understand that which is unconscious, that acts in us.

[21:08]

And in Buddhist teachings, it's said that you need two dimensions of spiritual practice. One is the calming qualities of calm and samadhi and equanimity, concentration. These are mostly missing in Western psychology initially. These are half of the factors of enlightenment. The other half are the qualities of investigation, awareness, mindfulness, discovery. Western therapy has quite a lot of that. But recently, the newer kinds of Western psychology, Rungian sand play, Reikian breath work, psychosynthesis, holotropic breathing, a whole variety of kinds, have or are developing ways that combine a clear seeing with a deep vehicle to understand what's not conscious in us, to take us to the levels of the unconscious, just as Buddhism does through samadhi and a very deep penetrating meditation.

[22:09]

Now, as we undertake a spiritual practice, it can happen that these unconscious forces which we act out over and over in our lives in repetitive and painful ways arise in spite of our meditation, in spite of trying to beware in meditation, or even as a result of it in some ways. I'll tell you a story. A friend of mine who was a monk in Sri Lanka and a very skillful yogi, he had a real ability to concentrate in meditation and had a quite developed yogic practice, did all of the Buddhist, the Sri Lankan version of the Buddhist samadhi practices and a lot of the insight practices and finally he went to India to travel and visit other teachers and he met this great master of another tradition, a Sikh tradition, who said, what are you doing as a monk in robes and a bowl?

[23:15]

You should get out there and make your own living, you know, we in this tradition don't believe that anyone should have a free lunch and religious life is for everyone, you shouldn't just depend on people to support you, and gave him a very hard time. And my friend who was a kind of anti-authoritarian person and kind of liked to argue anyway said, what do you mean? There's a great tradition in India from the Buddha and the yogis and so forth for society support renunciates and they got in a kind of fight about it, this great guru with hundreds of thousands of disciples and my friend. Finally they said, they finished that and my friend kind of sat quietly and the master said, well you came here to study, do you want some teachings? And monk said, yes indeed. So he said, all right, do this particular sacred mantra, do this visualization, practice in this way and if you're any good, if you are a good yogi, you'll have some results, you will see. So he went to his little cottage and after four or five days, because he had a good ability

[24:17]

to concentrate, he entered one of the realms of samadhi that come through the powerful repetition of mantra and certain visualizations and really left his body, went into a different state of consciousness, filled with light and there by reciting the mantra and doing this sat the master. And so he sort of traveled over as one does to see the master in this state and the master said, I see you're not such a bad yogi after all, you know, and you know, you see how beneficial our practice is because you attain this state and by the way, the other things I was saying were right also about not being a beggar and taking from other people and my friend being the kind of character he was said, you're absolutely wrong about that, I mean your practice is all right, but this is not so, there's a great tradition and there's a reason for being renunciate and they continued their argument in this plane of light and it didn't matter where they were. You understand what I'm saying? That wherever you go, there you are and it doesn't really matter what kind of attainments

[25:21]

you have. I'll tell you another story. These are sort of laying out the problems, if you will. I was on the Burmese border and I met a monk who I'd known in Burma who was a beautiful monk and teacher who had been part of the anti, there's this horrible dictatorship in Burma and great tragedy and people being killed and monasteries being closed and, and people being raped and exported to the forest lands as slaves and all kinds of stuff and he'd sort of fought against this and been one of the key monks in Rangoon to, to help inspire people to fight against the injustice and finally when he knew he was about to be thrown in jail or killed, he escaped to the border camps and there he opened a monastery in this great, people were dying of malaria and there was hardly food in the middle, like this beacon of light was this lovely temple that he opened. So, people could come and get inspiration, it was a lovely man.

[26:24]

Well it so happened as he was there teaching in this difficult circumstance that some Thai villagers would cross the border and bring food to the temple as they do, devout Buddhists and bring things, bring offerings and one of the young women who came to visit the temple and this monk had a very strong connection. The next thing I know I'm in Bangkok and I hear that my friend, this monk, is going to come to Bangkok and pour gasoline on himself and immolate himself. So I didn't want this to happen, I was quite upset. I went up to the border camps to find him and I said, well, is this true, are you going to do it? And he said, yes. I said, what, why are you going to do that? He said, the world isn't, isn't listening, they've forgotten Burma, I'm going to sit on the steps of the American embassy and pour gasoline over and at least someone will pay attention to our pain. So I talked to him some more, what makes you think people will listen to that and try to understand him and how's the rest of your life going? And as we talked over some time, it turned out that wasn't the only thing going on.

[27:28]

In fact, this young girl who'd come over and he was now in his sort of mid, late 40's, this young woman was in her early 20's, they'd fallen in love, which is fine, but he was someone who'd been a monk since being a very young boy. And he couldn't imagine himself as anything but a monk, he didn't even know what he would do for work or how he would live, seemed impossible to him. And on the other hand, he couldn't imagine somehow living without this young woman. And so he was looking for something to do and he thought, well, maybe burning himself was, you know, politically there would be some mileage in it. And I looked at him, I said, listen, you've lived through malaria, you've come through the jungles, you live in this border camp that's bombed all the time, you worked against the soldiers in Rangoon in deadly danger, you've been through all of this and getting close to a woman and now you're going to burn yourself? And he understood it was kind of funny at some point. I said, you mean relating to a woman is harder than all the rest of that? And he kind of nodded and said, yes, you know, and it's true the other way.

[28:33]

Don't let me give the impression that it's only one sided in this game. I'm sure the women in this room understand equally. So as we conversed about it, it became clear to him that his motivation, which wasn't so conscious prior to doing that, wasn't all noble, but some of it was rather escapist. And so he didn't end up doing it. Instead, they talked some together and finally she went away for a while and they agreed to be friends. And in the end, he turned out to have to deal with a lot of unfinished things in himself that 20 or 30 years of his spiritual life had not addressed. And it's made him a wonderful and much kinder and truly more compassionate teacher. Now this problem of dealing with suffering and the end of suffering and the unconscious roots of it in us that come from our past, which we all experience, is compounded by the fact that Dharma centers and Dharma teachings attract many of us, and I certainly include

[29:37]

myself, as the walking wounded attract people in grief, people with histories of abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, families of addiction. And I know it's popular to talk about dysfunctional families and so forth, but it's also true and it's very sad, especially I was in Bali on sabbatical the year before last and really living in a village where families were connected with one another. And we have lost the kind of connection that kept human beings sane for hundreds of thousands of years. And I went to this temple festival with a family I was living with in a nearby village, three villages over. There were 900 people at this festival. And I asked the made I was living with, I said, how many of these people do you know? And he looked at me shocked, he said, all of them. And it was just amazing. He said, I can tell which village and who's related to whom. And there was such a sense of communion and community and caring, who shares the land

[30:39]

in what way. But the Dharma attracts, for good reason, for healing, people who are isolated, betrayed, abused, wounded. And out of this, we want healing. We want reparenting. Maybe this spiritual community will do it for us, or our teachers will do it. We want to find some alleviation for our suffering. And in fact, we need to do that, because without that, spiritual practice would just be some mental ideal. You know, and when you try to practice and don't deal with your wounds and your past history and so forth, later the shadow comes out of the closet. And what we do is recreate the pain of our family again in the spiritual community. And it's happened many, many places. Now some people divide the need for these kinds of work into the spiritual and the psychological. And they say, well, I do spiritual practice, Sufi practice, or Zen, or some other kind

[31:41]

of Buddhist practice, or I don't know what it is, Kabbalah, Christian mystical practice, Jewish, whatever. And I do spiritual practice, and I don't bother with that psychological stuff. That's kind of low-level stuff. For me, that's a false split and a false argument. It's like saying that there's a difference between inner and outer, or a difference between our body and our spirit. It's the old kind of Christian dualism that gives rise to ascetic practices and hair-shirt mentality and so forth, where the body and the emotions are low and the spirit is high. And that's just the sickness of our world, the pain of warfare, of the fact that we are now the number one exporter of weapons in the entire face of the earth. We now export more weapons than anyone ever did, killing machines. And we do it to balance our payments so that we can import things from Japan, nice cars

[32:45]

and stereos and oil and all the things to keep our game going. How do we pay for it? We sell killing machines around the world, billions of dollars. And then we worry about our security. It's madness. And the madness of this world comes when the mind is disconnected from the heart and the body. I mean, it's an interesting game to think where you're going to target nuclear weapons and where they're going to target theirs. It's like chess. But you can't do it if you're in your body or if you're connected to your heart. It's just not possible. So it's a false split to divide the spiritual and the psychological. Or to say this part of my life is sacred and that part isn't. The Buddha said there's only one work, there's suffering and it's end. Where there's suffering, that asks our attention and that brings us to a place of freedom. So I like to change the language.

[33:46]

I don't even like to use psychological and spiritual because I think it's false. I don't do psychological work. I call it universal and personal. That we need to work and understand the universal level of our being. And as well to integrate that, to live that in the most personal way, to understand our personal predicament as human beings. It's much harder to say, I don't, I mean, it's much harder to say I don't work on the personal level. I only do universal practice. You can't get away with that. It's easy to love a thousand, it's easier to love a thousand people in your thoughts than one person intimately. You know what I mean? Do a great compassion meditation for all the beings of the world and then go home and deal with your wife or your lover or your husband or whoever it happens to be. So understanding that we can't divide our practice, it's a false division. And that the roots of Buddhist psychology and of Western psychology are understanding the unconscious forces that we have learned, the habits that motivate us and entangle us.

[34:51]

And seeing the need for freedom for suffering. What are some of the other guiding principles for healing and freedom? The first guiding principle that unites them both is awareness. To be mindful or aware so we're not so unconscious. So we don't keep reacting as if it was our mother or father or family or whatever our past history is over and over again. And as I said, part of the gift of spiritual practice is you can see it more clearly. I remember early in my teaching career, I was to lead the closing meditation of a ten day retreat, been teaching for a few years, and on the last morning we do a guided loving kindness meditation, a Buddhist practice of evoking feelings and thoughts of kindness toward all beings. And I just had a conversation with my girlfriend at the time and it was not a pretty conversation. We were quiet.

[35:52]

I was really angry at her and she was equally angry at me and we were really into it and the bell rang and I had to go and lead loving kindness meditation. So I go in and I sit there and there's a hundred people who all just have been meditating for ten days and it's my job, right? So I close my eyes, take a few breaths and start in my softest, sweetest kind of loving kindness meditation voice, you know, begin to cultivate thoughts of loving kindness and then direct them toward someone that you love a lot and then I would pause for a while and I'd think, that bitch, I'm going to call her back and tell her this is unfair and this and that. Say, now think of someone else you love a lot, right? Direct your loving kindness to them and then I'd think, and not only that, it was before she said that and I'm going to get, and I just, I went back and forth for the whole twenty minutes or whatever it was of all these sweet words in one side and then this angry, jealous, frightened, all those other things in the other. And at the end I couldn't help but laugh.

[36:53]

The mind will do anything, it has no pride at all, right? And the first game is simply to be aware of it. That's part of our practice. More deeply, this awareness is the basis for a shift of identity, a shift from our small self to notice something greater, to notice not only what's present, there was my anger and there was the loving kindness, but with spaciousness the whole game of body and mind. This is what the Buddha saw, even on the night of his enlightenment, let me see, that's good. The Buddha sat there on the night of his enlightenment, as he said anyway, I concentrated my mind, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of imperfection, malleable, steady, illuminated, and looked back over hundreds of births, thousands, hundreds of thousands of births, and saw myself being

[37:56]

born such a race, such an appearance, such food, experience such pleasure, such pain, such a life term, passing away, reappearing elsewhere according to conditions and karma again and again, this and that past life. And then I directed the divine eye and saw all creatures in any direction passing away and reappearing, fair and ugly, happy and unhappy, inferior and superior, according to their actions, worthy creatures, ill-conducted in body and speech, revilers of the dharma, those in wrong view and the fate of them and death, those who are happy creatures. The Buddha looked and saw in his own life, his past life, his many past lives and the lives of others. So, awareness has two functions. One is to see what's here, to notice it, and the second is to see the process of life itself. So, you notice what's present and then you notice how it's happening, what's happening

[38:59]

to it, which is this shift of identity. I'll tell you a story. There was a woman who came to see me who had been practicing meditation for some time and decided she wanted to do some therapy as well. She had a seven-year-old son. She felt very stuck in her spiritual practice. She was depressed a lot in her life. She'd been divorced for a few years. Her husband left her when her boy was four years old. And we began to talk about her life and it turns out her dad had left her mom when she was three. And so we talked and she told her story. Sometimes the first healing thing that's necessary is just to tell your story and have it heard by somebody whose heart really listens. And then we began to do some deep work with breathing and opening in her body. And out of this came grief, grief of the divorce, abandonment from her father, things that never

[39:59]

happened in her childhood, sorrow, and we spent some weeks and months just allowing that delicate process of feeling the grief that so many of us carry around for so long and don't really acknowledge and therefore never is healed. And after these months of work of holding the grief with awareness and with some greater space, finally she came ready somehow to face the very center of her pain in her body and her heart, at least of this great pain. And she saw herself at age three standing at the top of the stairs overwhelmed with pain as her father walked out the door and didn't turn around to say goodbye to her and she never saw him again. So that was the memory that was really agony for her. And the profound sense that came from it that he didn't love me, he doesn't love me. So at this point she was ready.

[41:02]

I had her stay in that place and picture all the details of the scene. And then I said, now feel yourself and how you felt and all that, which was, I mean, she felt, she feels it all the time. She didn't have to go very far to feel that. I said, now see if you can describe what your father looks like, what he's wearing, what he's carrying, how he's standing. She described it. I said, now see if you can go and be in his body. What does his body feel like? She said, oh, I'm full of tension. It's incredibly painful in here. I said, how do you feel as your father? Oh, I feel terrible. I'm frightened. I'm trying to escape from a disastrous marriage. I'm a really unhappy man. I don't know where to turn. I know I have to leave. I said, and why don't you turn to say goodbye to your daughter who's waiting at the top of the stairs? Is it because you don't love her? And her jaw dropped open in this moment, speaking as her father.

[42:03]

She said, no, I love her too much. I couldn't bear to say goodbye to her and leave. So then we waited for a bit. And I said, well, the belief, the story that no one loves you and that you can't be loved. Who makes that story? Where did that story come from? She said, I do. I did. I said, is it true? This was very hard for her to say. She said, no, it's not really true. And I had to rest in that space a little longer. We continued. I said, before your father and mother, this sense that you carried for so long of who you are, this unlovable person, is this really who you are? Is this who you are?

[43:04]

Who were you before your father left, before you were even born? And in that moment, in the right moment, that question opened a huge space in her of mystery of not knowing. And she saw that her mind contained her parents. They were sure still in there. And every other possibility as well. And it was there long before her parents had entered and would be there long afterwards. And we breathed together and worked in the process of letting go in body and heart until she came to this place of pure peace, of a kind of timeless space or awareness. And for months we went back and forth between that space and the old identity and how strong were the beliefs, no one will love me and people will always abandon me and so forth. And as she did, she began to learn to rest in this new identity, this new sense of her true nature.

[44:06]

And her depression gradually released and then eventually she remarried and started her life in a different way. Now my question for you is, is that psychotherapy or is that meditation? Which is it? And how could you even divide it? It's an awareness of the small sense of self and in giving it a true attention, the discovery of a whole shift of identity that that is not who we really are. Now this shift of identity can't be done too soon. You know, Buddhists especially like to do what is called a spiritual bypass or an end run. Okay, let's go for emptiness and forget all this human shit. You know what I mean? It can't be done too soon and it can't be avoided. Rather the true emptiness that we seek is in the middle of things.

[45:10]

Otherwise that's a false emptiness. It's the emptiness of running away. Anybody can do that. You might as well use drugs then, it's easier than coming and sitting on your Zafu. That's not emptiness, that's denial or avoidance. True emptiness is what she found, what she knows in the center of that that what is so if you go right to the middle of it, all the beliefs and constructions and unconscious things open to show you that none of that is who you are. But each place we're wounded, each knot, each grave wound that we carry and you know what they are, very often we know what they are, must be met with the second principle that joins Eastern and Western psychology and that's the principle of compassion. Not only awareness and a shift of identity, but compassion for all forms of life and for all the creatures within you.

[46:11]

There's a wolf in you, says Carl Sandburg, and a baboon in you and a monkey yowling and yapping. You got a menagerie under your heart, he says, under that bony ribcage, you are the keeper of the zoo. Doesn't take much meditation to discover that. So the second principle is that for these grave knots, the unconscious small self that we've carried to open, we need attention and compassion. When I first practiced and worked as a teacher, I thought it was in order to overcome, get rid of all these pollutants of body and mind, you know. And later as I've practiced and taught more, I've discovered that all these, the greed, the hatred, the fear, the delusion, the restlessness, the laziness, are generated within me from one source, which I would call the body of fear. That underneath of them is a contraction, a sense of fear that I'm not safe, that I

[47:18]

can't make myself vulnerable. And then I get angry or want this or that or feel deficient, all based on this body of fear. This body of fear, this small self, never opens by force. If you try to use force, you just get bounced into your mind at best. It unknots and opens like a rose, a flower in the garden with sunshine. It opens with kindness. So we are asked, can we hold all the creatures within us, just as we must in the earth around us? And I see disarmament worldwide as starting with ourselves. Can we hold all these with forgiveness? Forgiveness. If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm them all. Forgiveness, one Vipassana teacher at Harvard, Jack Engler, said that the whole of spiritual

[48:26]

practice is grieving, is really an honoring and a letting go of outer things and inner things till we really let go of it all. Another way to express it is that the whole of spiritual practice is forgiveness, for things not being the way our mind wanted them to be, that we wanted them to be. If we couldn't forgive, there would be no liberation. The Buddha's work would be useless, because forgiveness is a letting go of the past. And that's what liberation is about. It's hard, because we're human, which is a very difficult position to be stuck in. This paradox of being human in a human body, and it needs to be held in the great heart of a Buddha. A friend of mine, Richard Heckler, who's an Aikido teacher and body worker psychologist, did a six-month training for the U.S. Army Special Forces, Green Beret, to teach them

[49:31]

meditation and Gestalt and Aikido and all these kind of new things. Some of his friends wouldn't talk to him, because he did it, but his notion of it was that it would humanize the Army. So he had this program for 80 of the top U.S. Army Special Forces, the toughest guys in the Army and the most elite. And they trained in martial arts, and they trained in body work and Gestalt and so forth. They were thinking it would make them better soldiers, and he thought it might make them more conscious. In the middle of it, they had a one-month retreat in a Boy Scout camp in the woods in Massachusetts. And these are guys who parachute. They do halo jumps, high altitude, low opening. They jump out of the plane at night and pull the chute right when they're near the ground or near the cold ocean and then swim into the rocky shore of Maine and bivouac and put up a camp, you know, all in the dark. And have all been in different combat situations. These are really tough people.

[50:32]

So they sat this month retreat, said it was the toughest damn thing they'd ever done in their life. You know, battlefield was nothing compared to sitting a month in meditation. So he said, here I go into this little Boy Scout camp hut, and there they are in their uniforms with an M-16 behind them, sitting on Zophos, meditating. And I look in, and there's this guy, strong barrel-chested tattoos on him, you know, the best of the U.S. Army, wearing this shirt that says, 89th Army Airborne, with a big skull and crossbones on it, death from above. And I kind of blink, and I say, people don't wear T-shirts like that in meditation retreats. But he is meditating. There he was sitting, following his breath, breathing, 89th Airborne Division, death from above. This is the problem of being born in the human realm. It's the realm of paradox. And the only thing that's great enough to hold it, the mind can't deal with it, the only thing that's great enough to hold it is the great compassion of the Buddha, the

[51:38]

great heart of the Buddha. So whether it's psychology or meditation or whatever you want to call this process of healing, it needs a very deep compassion. A woman friend of mine, who is also a student in New Mexico, has a long history of abuse, sexual abuse, in her past. And she eventually became a healer and a therapist herself. And finally, when she was ready, she decided she was going to work with perpetrators. And so she started this group for, it was men that she was working with, it was a group for a dozen men aged 18 to 72 who had sexually molested or abused other people. And she said at first it took her a long time just to get the courage to go in the room. And she began to work with them, and it was really scary and frightening for quite a time. And gradually she began to hear their stories. And as she got to know them and listen to their stories, she found, as I'm sure you

[52:44]

all know, that of those 12 people, every single one of them had in some way themselves been abused as children. And she said, all of a sudden one day the whole consciousness of my mind shifted, and I found myself not sitting in a room with 12 enemies, 12 perpetrators, but with 12 little boys, all of whom had suffered in the same way that I had, at the hands often of their mothers or their grandmothers or their uncles or their grandfathers. She said, and then I said to myself, who can I blame? Who can I blame? Much of genuine therapy and genuine dharma practice is simply holding the pain that we share in our life as humans with our heart. Talking to Ram Dass one time about doing spiritual psychotherapy, he said, I do therapy still

[53:46]

sometimes for some close friends or people, but I only see them once a year. For one session a year, he said, that way we don't get too attached to one another. He said, that's your problem, Ram Dass, or whatever, anyway. I said, well, what do you do? He said, well, we do a long session, five hours, and for the first three hours I have them lie down right in front of me and I simply put my hand on their heart and I look into their eyes and that's what we do for a few hours. Poem from Mary Oliver. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

[54:50]

You only have to let the soft animal body, your soft animal body, love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. When you hold the heart and mind with compassion, it opens, it wants to open, it longs to open. And that doesn't mean that your heart's always going to be open like, you know, some kind of stoned hippie or something like that. The heart has its seasons. It's like a flower and it opens and it closes. Just it breathes the same way the breath breathes and the mind has its waves. But there's an openness that contains it all. And this kindness, this compassion is the ground of spiritual life and therapy. Now a third principle with this is the non-transferability of awareness. That is, awareness doesn't automatically transfer from one area to another.

[55:55]

A lot of us read these great spiritual books in our early years of spiritual practice or were told or led to think that success in our meditation will make us all better and make us enlightened and have satori and it'll all go away, all our problems and our neurosis and so forth. Anybody still believe that? I'm just checking. It's okay if you do, just try it out for a while, you'll see. I mean it's not so and I think it's one of the kinds of spiritual maturity that we've all come to over years as a community, as a culture. Part of the principle of this is that awareness in one area doesn't transfer to another. I'll tell you some examples. A friend of mine, a man who was a really great yogi in India and did, worked a lot of practice with his body, was able to be aware of, dissolve his body into light, turn his body into different

[57:00]

things, put his consciousness in any cell of his body, quite extraordinary yogi. He also had a very difficult family upbringing, kind of the usual painful story of alcoholic family and abuse and other such things. Anyway, he came back to this country and his one surviving parent, his mother, his father had died long ago, his mother was drinking and in and out of hospitals and so forth. Finally she died and it was terrible in some ways for him. Other things that were difficult were going on. He had a good meditation practice but he knew he needed some help so he went to see this therapist who did Reiki and breathing, had him lie down and begin to breathe gently and feel what was going on. So he started to tell the stories and his pain and his meditation and all of his stories and the therapist would ask, how do you feel? And he'd say, well, my face gets flushed and there's energy moving in my spine, in the

[58:03]

lower part of my spine and then I feel a tingling around my heart and I breathe some more and tell some more stories. The therapist would say, how do you feel? And he'd say, well, now my body feels more rigid in this part and I feel a tension going down my legs and so forth and this went on for weeks. How do you feel? And he could describe, this guy could tell you what's going on in the second cell over on his kidney, a fantastic samadhi and a tension. And finally one day the therapist said, how do you feel? And he said, I feel terrible and he broke into tears and he wept the grief that had been in him for a lifetime. He knew a lot about his body and he knew a lot about samadhi and a lot about certain realms and yet he used them as a defense to not feel his feelings. Does this make sense to you? Another monk who I worked with for a long time, who again had been in a monastery for

[59:04]

a dozen years, prior to that was very depressed, a kind of intellectual person and when he came out, he never got in touch with his body, it was sort of the opposite. He did it all with his mind. And he could recite dharma and give you the most amazing discourse on the, you know, interdependent origination and everything like that, but talk about living in your body, come here, you know, and that's where all his wounds were. So he used his practice to not feel the wounds that were too painful to feel. The Buddha speaks of awareness in the four foundations of mindfulness, body, feelings, mind, all the stories and thoughts and attitudes, and the dharma, that is the principles, the laws of impermanence and emptiness that govern them all. We must, in our spiritual life, actually direct our attention to each of these areas, otherwise you get people who are very aware of their body and cut off from their emotions.

[60:05]

Or some people who feel everything, but they don't know all the beliefs that are stuck in their mind about themselves. Or some people who are very aware of their mind and forget their body. A good teacher, or a good therapist, listens for what area you're stuck in. Where are you afraid? And part of what's central in this, and central to the Buddhist teachings, is particularly the domain of feelings. So the third principle was that awareness doesn't transfer automatically from one area to another. You need to actually practice it in all the different areas of your life or it won't happen. You can be great in one and really unconscious in another. This leads to the fourth principle that's common to therapy and meditation, that feelings are central, are particularly central. In the teachings of the Buddha, in the first teachings of his enlightenment, he spoke of

[61:06]

the jewel of his awakening being interdependent arising, paticca-samuppada, of how the whole world arises out of consciousness, the twelve links. And in these twelve links that he taught, he taught that there's a body that arises in the various senses and then there's sense impression, sense contact, and based in each sense contact there's feeling, pleasant, neutral and unpleasant kinds of feelings. And based on pleasant we grasp and on unpleasant we resist. And based on grasping and resistance there comes craving and clinging and all kinds of karma and entanglements that create the suffering of our life. He said the place for you to study liberation is the link between contact feeling and clinging or grasping. In each moment, pleasant or unpleasant kinds of feelings arise or neutral feelings. If we're not aware of feeling, we grasp, we cling, we get entangled. And when we're aware of feelings and see just feeling as feeling, liberation happens.

[62:09]

Now we as a culture, but it's not just us. The Asian cultures, Japanese, Burmese, Thai, Indian, are very repressive about feelings. We limit the amount of feelings women can have. They can cry and not a whole lot else or get hysterical maybe. And men even less. You know that cartoon in the Sylvie. She was sitting there one time, she had a little crystal ball as a madam and this woman came to her and said, kind of seeing her for fortune telling, she said, my husband won't talk to me about his feelings. She said, so what's new? She said, well, could you consult your crystal ball? So she looks in the crystal ball and she says, ah, next January, men all over America will begin to talk about their feelings. Women all over America will be sorry within minutes. We have this kind of ambivalent relationship to feelings, you understand?

[63:19]

I mean, I've done a lot of men's retreats and there is much emotion and feeling. It's wonderful. So this is kind of a caricature that's not accurate. But as a whole culture, men and women alive, we're not a culture that's so versed in our feelings and that's because we're afraid of them. We don't know that they're empty. We believe that they're solid. And in meditation practice, one of the key domains is to be aware of a name, sad and happy and angry and frightened until the whole menagerie becomes part of what we embrace with our awareness. Now if we pay attention to feelings, we will see that they are often at the center of the entanglements in our life, the knots that keep us repeating our past history unconsciously. When you sit in meditation, the thoughts will come, the top ten tunes. You know what I mean? They come over and over when you sit, Sachin. I call them insistent visitors. And after a while, you can be aware of them, easy come, easy go.

[64:20]

You kind of become what Ram Dass called a connoisseur of your neuroses. Oh, there's a good example of it. You just see it come and notice it. But if something keeps coming back and bothering us over and over, what it's asking for is some deeper acceptance. Why does that thought keep coming again and again or that worry or that fear or that imagining or that memory? What makes it come back over and over again? You know why. Because there's something there that's asking to be seen and accepted, that until it's accepted, it will keep coming back. And it might be grief or it might be love that you've never expressed or might be anger. Usually it's rooted, these complexes are rooted in feelings. So we need to allow them, to feel them, to bow to them, to say, when something comes back ten times instead of saying, oh, I wish I could get rid of it, say, what's this? I wonder what I'm feeling.

[65:21]

And as soon as you do that, what's asking for acceptance? It's not analysis or thinking. It's feeling what's present. When I sat in my first really long retreat, I had huge bouts of lust, fantasies, X-rated movies of every kind, you know, and partly it was that I was 21 years old or 22 years old and I was a young man, you know, who was in the monastery, should have been out playing around or whatever. So he thought, anyway. And I would note it and be aware of it and make space for it and try to be mindful and so forth. But it didn't make any difference. It kept coming more and stronger. I mean, you name the vision, I had it. Did it with men, women, animals and everything. So then I kept trying to just be aware of it. That's what you're supposed to do in meditation, right? Make a big pasture, let it come and go. The cows were multiplying. So then I said, all right, my teacher said, after a while, there's some reason this is

[66:24]

coming back. This isn't to analyze, but there's something here that's going on. So as I listened more deeply over time, I realized what was there. I listened. What was there when it came? What did I actually feel? And of course there was the fantasy and all the excitement from it. But what I discovered, I felt was lonely. And that those fantasies came, I was here, I was far away on the other side of the world, no one knew who I was and I was alone meditating and I was terribly lonely. And this pain of loneliness then would translate itself into the fantasy of sexual contact. And when I began to be aware of loneliness, the fantasies began to diminish. Not because they were bad, but because that was really what was fueling them. Memories come back because of some guilt or some grief that says, I need to be accepted. Fantasies of the future come again and again because of some fear that wants to be heard. And for me, loneliness is very, very deep. It's one of my deepest pains.

[67:26]

I'm a twin. I think that I got my twin brother to say, come on, let's go in the womb together, we'll have a little company, you know, even before birth. But even as I felt the loneliness, it kept coming back and I'd be aware of that and it kept coming again and again. Finally I had to listen more deeply and feel what is it. And there was fire, I felt physically the earth, air, fire, water, it was hot, the temperature, the fire element, it was contracted, the earth element, it was pulsating red. If I really felt in this place where I felt lonely all the time in my body, and the feelings were longing and fear and sadness and aloneness, kind of hunger, and as I let myself feel the feelings deeply, then all these different scenes of childhood came, all that are layered in our bodies if we let ourselves feel. Birth, womb things, past lives, all that stuff is there knotted around very deep feelings. And in it I felt there's something wrong with me, I'm always rejected, I'm always lonely,

[68:30]

I'll always be left in some way. And that was what fueled this, keep coming over and over again. So I let it be there and I actually let it open to a great, just held it with kindness. And what I found in the middle was a kind of a hole, this emptiness that I'd been trying to fill with sex or anything else, to not feel this emptiness. And as I felt it and just held it with real kindness, that space of emptiness opened and it got bigger and clearer and emptier. And as it got bigger, it lost its sense of tension. It was just space. And somehow in that I felt a well-being and a contentment and a peace that was the opposite of that longing. It was as if somehow going into the middle of it and allowing it to open and be as big as it wanted, I came to the very thing that I'd been seeking, that nothing from the outside would have filled it with.

[69:30]

Does this make sense to you? So that the key is the acceptance of feelings and the opening in the very center of our being. Give you another example. I had a student come in Insight Meditation Society at the end of a three-month retreat. And for the first month of his practice, he had a very powerful meditation and really sat very strong and had very clear mind. And he started to feel the power of attention that could develop. And then all of a sudden after six weeks, he got very, very sleepy. And he was sleepy and sleepy and he spent six more weeks just fighting sleep. So I wasn't there at that retreat. I came at the end and I began to work with him. And he said, actually two things happened. I said, how do you feel the sleepiness in your body? Close your eyes. Well, I feel a certain lethargy and I just try to be aware of it. But also my shoulders get incredibly tight when I get sleepy.

[70:32]

And this pain has been here along with the sleepiness for the last six weeks. I said, all right, that's interesting. Let's pay attention to it. Feel your body. Feel the pain. What's it like? It's hot. What else is it like? Well, it pulsates. It vibrates. That's the fire element or rather the air element of vibration. It's hot. It's the fire element of temperature. It's yellow colored. It spreads across my back. It does this and that. I said, just feel it. Really explore what that's like. And I said, now as you feel it, what feeling is there? He said, fear, which is usually a sign that there's something else about to come. So I feel the fear and then see if you can sense an image or memory or feeling that's just there that wants to arise under it. And all of a sudden his mouth opened. He said, oh, I said, what was it? He said, I'm 16 years old. I'm a football player. I said, yeah. He said, this is one of our big games and I go up to block this guy and I'm really intent

[71:35]

on knocking him down and I do it so forcefully, I smash him with my forearm that I break his arm. He drops to the ground and writhes in pain. And he said, that's the scene I see. And I said, it's terrifying. I said, how'd you feel? He said, I felt guilty and ashamed and afraid. And here I was trying to be a football player and trying to do this and then I broke this guy's arm. I said, all right, just stay with the feelings, guilt, fear, grief, all that are there. I said, now as you feel that, also see if you can sense what's the connection between this in your shoulders, the sleepiness and the meditation. Why did all this start? What do you know from this image? And he said, oh, my meditation was getting very strong. I felt really powerful in a way I'd never felt in meditation. And what happened is I became terrified that if I became powerful in this way, I would

[72:41]

hurt somebody. And so my whole body and mind shut down. The same way it shut down when I was 16-year-old in the same place. So we hold this small identity in unconscious ways in our body and it comes up in meditation or therapy. And by listening with compassion and some depth, things get released. You don't need to go looking for them. They'll find you. It's not analysis, it's presence. This leads to the fifth and the last principle I'm going to talk about tonight. And that is that many of these things you can't do alone. One of the great statements about the Buddha is, I did it myself. I'm the Buddha because I could do it alone myself. But of course, he did have two good teachers prior to that. In fact, and then he built on their teachings. And the Buddha said, what makes me unique is I can do it alone and you can't. Even the Buddha used to say that. Much of the really deep work of healing or awakening that comes as a part of our spiritual life

[73:48]

has to be done in relationship to another. And the best of psychotherapy is like a joint meditation where together someone asks you to pay attention to those places where you're stuck. Where it's so hard or fearful or unconscious that you couldn't do it alone. The deepest wounds in our life most often are produced in relationship to another person. And the place that they need to be healed then is in relationship. They don't even come up when you're by yourself. They hide. They come when you're with your lover or your spouse or your Zen teacher or your roommate or your child. And because they're created in relationship, they need to be untangled in relationship. And that relationship is a kind of sacred trust. I did sand play for a while with Dora Kolf, the woman who developed the Jungian practice of sandboxes and figures

[74:50]

as a very deep kind of symbolic therapy with her in Europe. And she had this wonderful house in Switzerland that dated back to the 10th century. And this one room was filled with 10,000 figures from tipis or Navajo figures to soldiers to boats to temples to trees. Every kind of figure in the world. And these two little sandboxes in the middle. She was kind of the archetypal wise woman. The old wise woman. And I walked into her room. She was 80 years old and I had known her. I said, I really want to do some work with you. And I sat down. It was like entering a temple. She said, the work that we do is to create a free and protected space for the psyche where you feel totally safe and totally free for whatever needs to arise. And then to provide a form, not just words, but in this case it was symbols and sand. It could be paper, art, music. Something that bypasses your story, your mind. And I felt like I had waited lifetimes to walk in that room.

[75:54]

It was such a treasure to enter that room and have someone say, this is a free and protected space and feel it and know that I could do anything. And I picked figures and made scenes and the deepest things came out of me. The healing of our heart takes place in relationship. It's done together as a dance. And in it we learn to trust ourselves. By the trust that's communicated by the space of the other. The Buddha recognized this. That's why there's transmission in meditation. That's why there is such a thing as teachers. It's the gift we give one another. We remind one another. There's this shift of identity. It's like we borrow another person's identity. That we can step outside of the pain and make this great compassionate heart that can hold it all. We remind each other of our Buddha nature. So one last story and then a couple more comments to make.

[76:58]

This is a true story about two children. One six-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl. The eight-year-old girl had a blood disease. Very rare. The only way she could be healed was with transfusions. But because of her blood type, they couldn't find a match. The only match was her six-year-old brother. So the doctor and her parents went to him and said, Your sister will die from this rare disease if we don't have your help. Would you be willing to give blood to help her, to save her life? Six-year-olds are kind of thoughtful. He said, I've got to think about it, if you don't know six-year-olds. So he did for a while. He thought about it. Finally he came back. He said, Okay, I'll do it. I will do it. The doctor had him come to the clinic and lay them both together, he and his sister, on these little beds and drew blood from him, a bottle, and then transferred it over so he could see the blood going into his sister.

[78:02]

And then he called the doctor over as this was happening and he said to the doctor, Will I start to die right away? That was his question. Because being six years old, it wasn't explained to him quite right. He thought that giving his blood meant to give his life, which is why he had to think about it for a little while before he did that. It's a true story. We all have that place in us. We all know there's a place that longs to express greater compassion and greater wisdom, that knows that we are nothing and that we are everything, that we are connected with all things in this nothingness. And so whether you call it psychotherapy or meditation or just the freedom, the awakening of the heart, our practice is to see the emptiness in form and the form in emptiness,

[79:04]

and to bring an intimacy, moment to moment, to see where there is constriction and fear and to touch that with compassion and openness and allow that freedom to come from our being. For Buddhist students, the question is very simple. Are we more compassionate? Are we more spacious and easy? Are we more honoring of ourselves and others? That's the measure of our practice. So I read you a poem to end, from David Budbill, called Bugs in a Bowl. That great old crazy Chinese poet Hanshan of a thousand years ago said, we're just like bugs in a bowl, all day going round and round. Haven't you noticed? I say that's right. Up the sides and back down again, round and round, over and over. Sit in the bottom of the bowl, head in your hands, cry and moan, or look around, see your fellow bugs.

[80:09]

Say, hi, how are you doing? Say, nice bowl. And somehow, I think all the work we do, I mean, how do you divide it, is that simple work of looking around and offering your heart to yourself and to others and to the world, and that brings your blessings. Now a lot of what I've talked about is in a new book that's coming out in a month. You can ask your bookstore to order it, if you will, called A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life, A Path with Heart. And it's teachings on psychology and meditation, on the nature of self, no self, true self, compassion and codependence, the mistakes of teachers and why they make them, and a lot else about practice. So let's take a few minutes for questions. Ten, fifteen minutes, is that all right? Or comments.

[81:10]

I've spoken on and on and on, and I don't know why. I guess I just did. What do you think? Anyone, please. You said that awareness cannot be transferred. Yes. To learn through stories. And then earlier, perhaps, you said that there's no separation, that the mind and the heart are really not two different entities. And if that is the case, then why is there a difficulty to transfer awareness from the body, the mind, to the emotional? If I said the second thing about the mind and the heart not being separate, in a way, we're all not separate, and your question is well taken. But there are these apparent boundaries, and I think that they need to be honored as much as we need to honor that we drive on the right-hand side of the road instead of the left. And the reality, I want to talk really both personally and practically tonight,

[82:15]

and not philosophically. The reality is that awareness is only semi-transferable, that you learn it in one area, but unless you ask yourself, what is the shadow, where don't I pay attention, where am I stuck, and bring attention to that, all the good work you do in one place won't necessarily transfer to the other. And that's true between the heart and the emotional body and the mind or the physical body. Other questions, comments, poems, thoughts? Please. Yeah, I guess in focusing on the not-so-pleasant thoughts and emotions... Yeah, I guess there's just a question as to how far to take that, and I guess maybe that's partly answered in the idea of working with another,

[83:19]

probably someone who's more experienced. But, yeah, there's that question of how far to go into those things. And there's, I think there are tiers of manifesting. So, what kind of things might you be afraid of manifesting? Like anger, for example? Yeah, anger and violence. Yeah. Sure, if you really look into yourself, you find that there's rage. And if you have not yet had help in some skillful way in dealing with that rage, it's really frightening. I mean, that's what's making Yugoslavia or Somalia, and it's not just there, but it's in us. So it can be frightening, and it can be overwhelming. And part of the gift of good Dharma practice, and part of the gift of good therapy,

[84:22]

is to provide a sacred place, a safe container, to learn how to feel all of that without doing harm to yourself or another. If you feel like it's too much, that stuff comes up and it's too much to handle in meditation, then you need help from a teacher or you need to find someone to work with. So your question is very well put. It's not that you need to do a lot of analysis about it, it's more that we open naturally, as I said, like a flower. And if things come and all of a sudden you realize, well, this is what's going on in me, can I do this myself? Fine, or maybe this is the time to get someone else to be with me, to understand this piece, because it's too difficult. And that's really kindness to yourself. Please. I call it, it can be an addiction or denial.

[85:31]

Basically, we're a culture that has misused everything. In a certain way. And whether it's the environment or science and technology or all kinds of other capacities. So why shouldn't we misuse spiritual practice? It's our habit, right? And so, like anything, it can serve us or we can use it to defend against certain things or to hide. I know people who've... One person who came to a whole series of three-month retreats and did retreats all around the year. And he came from this enormously wealthy family and had been given some millions of dollars when he turned 21. And he was kind of driving an old Volkswagen and wearing, you know, kind of torn, tattered blue jeans. And a lot of his meditation practice was to avoid having to deal with the particular karma of his family. And he did it, and for some years till I kicked him out, I said, you know, go and get the money. I don't care what you do with it. Throw it away for all I care. But deal with it. Deal with your parents. So anything can be used in that way.

[86:33]

When meditation is well-taught and when meditation is well-used, it's the antidote to that. And that's the purpose of a teacher, is to listen, to sense what it is that we need to pay attention to and what will bring us freedom. Please. You were talking about feelings, honoring your feelings, giving your feelings a place. Could you talk about, or expand a little bit, about feelings and emptiness? We are not our feelings. Feelings and emptiness. Could I expand about that? Everything's empty. And I don't mean that in some kind of big philosophical sense, although it may be so. If you pay attention, thoughts come and go by themselves. You don't ask them. They think themselves. Feelings arise. Mostly we're overcome by happiness, sad, fear, anger. Someone pushes the right button, like your kids or your parents, for example. They know all the kind of notes to play. And these feelings arise. It doesn't take much. They're not us.

[87:36]

We don't own them. We don't direct them very much. We don't possess them. If you thought you were your feelings, you'd be in trouble. If you thought you were your thoughts, you'd be in worse trouble, maybe. They're empty in that they arise out of conditions. They're interdependent. They arise for a certain time. They pass away. Mostly I've noticed in spiritual communities and Buddhist communities that there's a kind of danger of saying, Well, feelings aren't so important. We really need to be clear in our mind, or negative feelings should be let go of, or something like that. And it's actually because people are frightened of them. They take them to be more real than they are. If you sit and you discover Yugoslavia and rape and maiming and your own ability to cause pain to others, which I certainly have seen in myself, is there and you learn how to feel it, then you realize that feelings are empty because they come and go and you don't have to act on them

[88:37]

and they're no more real than you choose to make them. They're actually real in the ignoring of them and empty in the awareness of them. Does that make sense? I don't know if that answers your question. Go ahead. I was thinking about the honoring the feeling and yet knowing that the feeling is empty and we have to give the space for the feeling to be there to honor it and yet honoring something that is empty. Everything's empty. We honor one another and we honor our bodies by eating. But I think people kind of forget that feelings are empty and they take them seriously and avoid them. So to know that it's empty allows you to honor it, really. Please. I have three brothers, two of whom live in the city here. They're not my twins. One is the chief building inspector for the city of San Francisco and he studied with Harada Roshi, one of the Harada Roshis in Japan for a little while.

[89:40]

Another younger brother works at Genentech as an engineer who's also done a bit of spiritual practice. My twin brother's done the least of it. He's a marine biologist and a professor at the University of Maine. So we're pretty different. Are you close? Yeah, we're fairly close and we're different. I love my brothers. They're wonderful. And it's really a great gift to have brothers that you're close to. Please. The question is, I'm talking about feelings. Is this the same thing as sensation? No. It's a wonderful question. It partly depends on what your type is, like if you think in Jungian terms, a feeling type or thinking type or sensation type. Certain people know themselves primarily through their body, that is what Jung called the sensation type.

[90:41]

And each mood or emotion, happy, sad and so forth, will have a reflection in your body. When you're sad, you'll feel a certain way. When you're angry, you might feel hot and riled up. When you're fearful, you'll feel cold and contracted and clammy. But the anger or the fear or the sadness, those are moods or emotions that are not just the sensations. They're an entirely different dimension of your being. We have a physical body of sensations. We have an emotional body, one of the five skandhas. We also have a set of thoughts and perceptions. And so they're to be distinguished. They're related, but they're separate. What makes you ask? Please. Well, I thought when you were talking about independent arising, that you were talking about becoming more of a feeling. So that one can break the cycle. Yes. And I thought when the Buddha was teaching it, that he was talking about becoming more of a sensation. No, there's feelings both mental and physical.

[91:43]

There are... but by feelings he didn't mean just sensation. Feeling is not the sensation. Contact is a sensation. Feeling is the feeling tone, pleasant or unpleasant or neutral, in the body and in the mind, that arises, the qualities that arise with. It comes after the sensation. Yes. You can have a sensation and there'll be certain contact and then with it there's a certain feeling quality. And the same in the mind. I find in sitting or just in daily practice that when things come in contact with the body, I totally miss the sensation. I find I'm already rolling in the reaction to it. I'm in trouble even getting just the bodily sensation. It becomes interesting in practice to pay attention to different dimensions of experience.

[92:44]

What the Buddha called contemplating or examining the five processes, the five skandhas of life. So sometimes it's useful in meditation just to feel life as a physical flow. Sound comes and you feel it on the ear. Sights come, if you're really careful, you can feel them almost hitting the eye. Moods come and you feel them reflected in your body. Pains, pleasure arise all in the body. And so you can take some time and just feel the skandha of the body. Then you could pay attention to moods and feelings and just be aware of those for a while. Then you could be aware of perceptions. And it becomes very useful because we identify or get entangled in one or another area to see them as they are, which is simply empty processes. I think it's probably enough time. I don't know what you would like, but it's ten after nine. We were supposed to end at nine. Is that correct? What I tried to do...

[93:42]

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