This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Hello. How's it going, guys? I just found a few of my films so often. It's kind of a rough thing, actually. It's a wonderful thing, a rough thing, to end up in a new life, to be a gift, to be a responsibility. Don't worry about it, right? I'm an idiot. And this is the newest place. It's a beautiful place, great house garden, and I said both. It's a Zen Buddhist place, and there may be some shishin, and don't take it personally.

[01:06]

Don't take it too seriously. The Buddha, this house, includes everything and everybody. So, if you feel like you need to be babysitting around yourself, that's not a problem. So feel free. So how many people just in general identify as female? You gotta make assumptions. You never know. Davis might show up. How many girls might show up? You who are younger, I want to share a story that Buddhism teaches about what is like, how do we live and [...]

[02:20]

How supporting yourself? So one day the Buddha said to his disciple, Annamari, what do you think about having a good morning? And Annam said, oh, I feel extremely fortunate. And Buddha said, how fortunate exactly? And Annam was not able to answer. He said, good time. He was being quizzed. And so the Buddha shared his story. The story is at the bottom of an ocean, there's a huge, vast ocean. So picture that. Like the biggest ocean you can run. There's a turtle, regular-sized turtle. He's blinded more high, or sometimes they say blinded more high. And he lives at the bottom of this ocean. And also in this vast ocean, there's a ring about the size that will allow a turtle to send him. So pretty small. And... Every once in a while, so that he swims around and his ring drifts around.

[03:25]

And every once in a while, I don't know, a gazillion years, you're wearing long lips through. He puts his head through that ring. And so the Buddha makes that image, and then he says to his student, how often do you think that would happen? And the student says, Master, I don't get that. Such a thing to hardly ever take place. Would you think it would be possible, though? And Anang said, well, no, not the Apostle, just very unlikely. And Anang said, that's true. But Anang, for us to be born human is still more difficult than we ought to have. For that turtle to put its head through that hill. That's how rare and precious it is to come into the occasion of the giving. That's all. So this is a story, this is a teaching, but it's like a, it's a damage we can add, and we can like put it in our pockets, and we keep it there.

[04:26]

This picture of this bass section of those turtles, striving to consent to this thing, and every once in a while it does it, and like very rare. And then we can remember that the teaching was not just about the turtle, but about us. This is what it means to be born in a human form. It doesn't mean that it's a lucky place to be, just sometimes it isn't. But that's hard to be in the United States. There's a lot of pain that comes along with all the sensation they have, and this realm that we have, where there's lots of impacts. But that's how beautiful and precious and rare every single human that was ever born, that ever will be, every single one of you, me, [...] everybody is literally This is the teaching of Buddhism. This is how we hold it in the city of dinner. This is how we hold ourselves. This is how we hold other people. We won't forget science. So we'll reach in our pocket and we're like, what's this true ring doing in my pocket? Oh, that's great. Good. That's good.

[05:28]

That's what it means to be. So to me, this is like a gift. This big image. This teaching. I wanted to give it to you guys. Let's take it here for you. And if something comes along, he says, well, I don't like you. You can be like, oh, that's just because you've forgotten this thing. You can tell this story. That's okay, you just are confused. You forgot what you are, person. And then that made you forget what I was. And adults can do this too. People can come and be like, I don't like you. And that happens. Do that to each other. A fair amount of frequency, although actually sometimes this is kind of subtle, And we can raise our pocket and mentally take out, oh, I'm sorry. You've forgotten what you are. And then you forgot what I am. And now we're there in a painful situation. And before I do something, you know, out of my pain, I can remember, oh, you're precious, and so on.

[06:34]

So that's my goal for you guys. I hope that Sometimes come in pain. Even when you're feeling really good. That's right. That's right. So thank you guys all for being here. I used to do the kids' programs. I used to do the kids' programs. I'm going outside. I'm going to get by, okay? Sorry, is it our clock?

[07:36]

Yes. So here we are in our human situation. I was trying to think about things. I was reading the Declaration of Independence. Sounds like eighth grade. I stood there refreshing, and I was like, whoa, what truth do we want to be self-advented? And that led you along with the vision of trying to, like, I'm trying to name, like, what the founders actually meant when they said that all of them were free and equal, like, straight, white, you're going to send it to English. You know, not just, but, you know, and then we'd really like to update it. You hope this treats me so well that all human beings are created equal.

[08:42]

And our dad is thinking, we should update it. And we can update it. We can do that with a practice. Yeah. And then I was trying to think about what do we know? I mean, what do we know when we know that one another are human? You can say for everybody here, it's here when we were born. And we were born to a human woman. There was a human woman that was each and every woman. And we're going to die. I'm not saying we're excited. That's true. Very true. Especially when people are old enough. reality. And we encountered it and I encountered it. So let's think about just those simple ones and how the, at least for me and the cultures that I live around in in the United States, are not so supportive to hold those truths in front of us.

[09:54]

These are really basic. We were born, we owe our lives to a human, and we're going to die. All of those get pretty obscure in our daily lives, I would say. The preciousness of the Buddha gave this teaching and it predates, it goes, you know, it's old. So it might not have come from this actual ellipse. It goes all the way back to India. So it's foundational to basically all the schools of Buddha. That what it means to have a human life is as rare and precious as those plural bodies have to remain. And the preciousness of the human life comes from, there's a couple aspects to it. The first is that the opportunity of the human realm is very particular. So in the Buddhist cosmology, there are different realms where beings can be born. If we happen to be born here, we are born into the realm where we're most likely to wake up because we have enough suffering to get our attention.

[10:55]

And sometimes it consumes us. But throughout the course of a human life, for the most part, most of us have Enough suffering that we feel it all the time, but mostly that will totally consume us. Enough joy that we know of world interaction. And then enough consciousness that we can look at all this and strive to make sense of it. And those are the ingredients for enlightenment, actually. So to the Buddha, and the Buddha, as the teaching of our tradition is the Buro was human. He kept taking human form. He also took some other animal form away in the past, but he moved into the human realm for a very lifetime to be a person to be able to live. And so he treasures this realm because he knows the opportunity of this realm. And the other thing about those things that makes our lives precious is the unbelievable particularity of each one of us.

[11:58]

This gets a little overdone, and I don't know, I feel like we hear this kind of thing. I heard this, like, since I was a kid, like, there's no way we can deal with you. But it's true. And it's confoundingly true that each one of us, in our particular expression of humanity, is unprecedented, even if we're an identical twin or triple. But each one of us is so particular, and our particularity is a gift that is suitable for this world. So those are the things, but that's why the Buddha was like, this is how it is. It's kind of easy to get abstract when we talk about all of humanity and all beings. But our practice is not abstract. So this teaching about humanity, look to your left. Look to your right. It applies right now to me and you. Look in your left.

[13:00]

It applies to this one. It applies to the one closest to you, which we call ourselves. And that's another reality. And I would say it's a reality. This preciousness of human life, it's just out of reality. Like sometimes what I do is kind of, sorry, I've been, I've never mentioned this before. And I apologize, but I just, I feel like even scientifically speaking, chances of the genetic content that made each of us. And that's not all of us, as we know. We have karma, we have spirit, we have soul, we have all this other stuff. I don't know if that's controversial, but I'm just saying. We have clinicians and training. But the genetic piece of us is a big part of what makes us particular. The possibility of that, in any 24-hour span, that that particular sperm and that egg come together, the eggs are like a higher probability. That's what's up on, you know.

[14:02]

I think it's something like 80 to 100 dollars per in one go. 24 hours later, a whole new batch. I can't do the math right now. The probability is extremely rare. And that's not to say I believe our current is a powerful thing. It drives us to be, and also we should pause. That's amazing. And if we don't want to go biological, just the fact, I mean, I don't know, there's some younger people there that I can see, but if we've made it past the age of two, it's a miracle. And it required other people. There's a psychologist who I really love, D.J. W. Winickop, who says, there's no such thing as an infant. What he means is there's no such thing as an infant in isolation. There's always an infant caregiver diet.

[15:09]

There's always an infant caregiver connection. That's our foundation of human reality. We do not exist in isolation. But we grow up, and I would say particularly in many cultures in the United States, but not all of them, we grow up with this unbelievable engine of individualism that We exist with our natural tendency to be deluded about what we are. And we start to think we are separate from other people. And we start to think that we're isolated and alone. And somehow, isn't it, actually? We start to devalue ourselves, and that's hard to see. Because a lot of times, especially in the United States, we're popping ourselves up so much. It's just the same thing. It's devaluing ourselves. I feel like the United States, as they It's like the kingdom of duality, yeah. The very foundation of this country, and by this country I mean like, you know, since the Declaration of Independence, so there's a lot going on here before that, we all know that.

[16:12]

But the like, mine and not mine duality is foundational to this country. Me and others, because it's foundational to the value of this country. That was why those men, all those white men in that room could say, All men were created equal and not made men. Because they had been steeped, and by then, in a really long time, they'd been steeped in the duality, lots of dualities of self and other, of also men, of men, women, of Christian and not Christian, actually, was a big part of that. Black and white. Right and wrong, healthy and mild, normal and normal. So these are like, I feel like the cultures that I spent time in that were raised in, this dualism is found each other. And that culture of dualism is like paddled around the world through media and movies.

[17:18]

It seems to be pretty impacted by this idea of a whole bunch of dualisms. So Zen is the practice of non-duality, of challenging duality. And I think duality, it's a little misleading in the sense that it's not like there's only two things ever. We are parsing things out and we are slicing and icing reality into billions of parts all the time. For example, we can fall into thinking that we are not one of 7.5 billion others, 7.5 billion separatednesses. And... And so the practice of non-reality is a little bit challenging because our mind thinks in dualism. It's what, you know, especially if we've been acculturated away, because I have learned that to some others in the term, where we're being taught that before we can even speak.

[18:20]

And where actually the impacts of that, through generations, are being woven into our very tissue. Like we know, for example, that the biases against people of color in the United States, and particularly against Black Americans, are so impactful and so violent that there's epigenetic changes and adaptations that get handed down. So before we were even a thought of being born, stuff was happening based on duality, based on kind of a vicious amount of duality that changes who we are and that changes who we believe. So, but non-duality is challenging because we can't get at it. It doesn't, like, non-duality, actually, let's step back and say, so we say non-duality to talk about the way we challenge separating things in the world. We also turn out emptiness that's used a lot.

[19:22]

People have heard that term? Emptiness? So emptiness means empty of your own being. It means to challenge the idea that things are separate and isolated. I feel like we can equally use the term connectedness. The radical connectedness of all things is the other side of how things are empty of our own being. We are inextricably connected and impacted all the time by some things we can see and imagine, like genetics and cultural influences and stuff like that. But we're also... be impacted all the time by billions of things we can't see and we can't account for. And if we're really gonna let non-newality impact our lives, we're gonna open to that vastness that our conscious brain can't deal with at all. And so our conscious brain can keep going back to making bite-sized chunks of reality that we can deal with. It's like, well, I'm over here and you're over there, and we're good, I understand what's happening.

[20:25]

And we don't, our practice is not to disparage or deny particularity. I think, you know, it's a foundational teaching that the preciousness of human life is about our particularity. We are different than one another. There are differences. But we don't let those obscure the ways that we make each other all the time. So we can't, so the brain isn't like stuff it can't hold. know and get right. I mean, there's another big acculturation that, I don't know about you, but like, you know, I was in school, my brain was barely formed, I was in school. And I was learning about, I'm supposed to get something right, you know, know this, and get it right. And so that's how many of us approach harmony kings, you know, and understand this. So the brain is like, this thing is, it's like trying to bite something that's too huge. Bite it to water, it's too big. So the brain is like, I'm just going to go back to this nugget over here that I can't. But our practice is to keep open.

[21:28]

And so there are different ways we can challenge this. It's not that we actually get to grasp it and have it, but we can open to it and include this perspective of how vast it is to be humanly. Thich Nhat Hanh writes this beautiful book called A Harder Understanding About the Heart Sutra, because I'm a little tiny, thin boy. talks about, so he does an exercise for, like, engaging with vulnerabilities. Like, if you look at this paper, so if you look at this paper, you're like, that's a piece of paper. That's fine, but that is one side of things. It's a conventional kind of dualistic view. I know what this is. It's a piece of paper. He said, you know, we can also know that, and then we can also say, look at this paper, you can see the sun shining in. the tree that it was. You can see the lumberjack and the lumberjack's parents, the food the lumberjack eat, and the paper mill people, the delivery guy.

[22:33]

So we're appreciating the multiplicity and the vastness of a piece of paper. That's a way that we can challenge the idea that we will in an oversimplified way what this is. That's a Zen practice. But the power of dualistic thinking is really strong. We all know this. It creates tremendous violence and impact. So it's not just enough to think like, well, if these ideas of duality are causing us a problem, we need to just change our mind. Because again, our mind will keep going back. We will do what they're made to do, which is to make... things oversimplify and less digestible to our mind. So our practice is forever. It's lifelong.

[23:34]

If you like, then practice great, because you get to do it forever. You engage it over and over again, forever. Because the mind will keep sliding back into like, oh, I know what this is. And then, that's a good one. Whenever you find yourself like, I know what's going on, I know what this is, I know what I am. That might be a useful thing in the moment. Don't discard it, but then open the gates a little wider. I know what I am, and I am, I just want to say, I contain multitudes. The Bodhisattva battle, which is a Zen school, is a Bodhisattva school of Buddhism, is to engage with the liberation of all beings, I guess you could say before oneself, or now making a distinction between the liberation of all beings and the liberation of oneself, and the vow to keep being reborn until all beings are saved.

[24:38]

So when I first heard that, I came from, like I'm not just from the United States, and I'm not just white, I came from a Catholic background. The dualities I was offered were very strong around good and bad. And around self and other, and around... So then to be a good person was to care about other people, not about the self. That was at least the subtext of what I was getting. So when I heard this about, I got really excited. It was super resonant for me. I'm like, yes, forever. So forever I can just give myself away from the benefit of others. I'll be so altruistic and virtuous. I was confused. This is not an altruistic vow. It's a vow that's based in reality. There is no such thing as one person's liberation without the liberation of all beings. That's just a point of fact. Because we are so intricately connected the way we are, nobody gets helped alone.

[25:43]

So, it's still a very nice vow. I recommend it. And I love it. I get very excited about it, but it doesn't feed the part of me that learns to hate myself, basically. Which is good, because it's not at all useful for bodhisattva to hate oneself. This self is just as valuable as any other self. It's not more valuable, but it's just so valuable. I recently saw a movie on Netflix. How are we done it? It's a Dharma talk, I would say. It's a teaching about connectedness, I would say. It's offered in kind of a wonderful context of a very skillful stand-up comedian. So it's funny. And in the way that the things are really funny, like super smart and a little bit uncomfortable, that's what makes it fun.

[26:50]

She's very, very skilled. And it's just like funnier and a little more emotional maybe than a regular Dharma shop, but yay. Like can't we use, can't we tolerate a little more emotions? Yes, I think we can. And in it, so she talks about a lot of things. And she offers the story of her life basically to, you know, what was a crowd of, I don't know, it looked like a thousand people, but now it's like to the whole world because this thing is all really nice. And she does this in such a simple way that it's a gift, so I recommend receiving it if you are interested. And before she became a Senate comedian, she was an art history major. In case you're art history majors, they could be anything. And so she knew quite a bit, and part of her story was a

[27:52]

which I don't know, I'm not took art history, but I don't know that much about art, to sprung I even anyway, but I was interested to hear what she had to say about both Manville and Picasso, the great informed ideas about them, it seemed to me. And what she said about Picasso, though, I do have some background on it, she said, so she's talking about, she talks about Picasso having And I keep another talk where I said it was Dalvin. I feel like I don't know. But she talks about mental illness. And she said, when she says that, people are like, no, you need medical. She's like, no, I don't need medical. I need medical. It's the mental illness of misogyny. And when she said it, I was like, thank you. I don't know about you. I've grown up and I've lived in cultures where misogyny is a given societal foundational thing. And it has never felt appropriate to me. It feels like a distortion of human existence.

[28:55]

It did when I was three or two. I was waking up to this, I was very little, and I was like, this is not right. This is not right. Unfortunately, I was a child in the 70s where a girl, anyway, could create gender variant and get away with it. It's kind of, it's a gender type for a tomboy sense. And still. And still, I, in every moment I know, of every variation of the expression of being a female and being in that dualistic designation, has suffered the pain of oppression for being a woman. Period. So when she said that, and she also said, misogamy is a mental illness. It disconnects us from, and it disconnects us from our own humanity. Because every time we engage in a dualism, She wasn't talking about drafting, but she was. Every time we engage in the middleism, we are lifting up from our own humanity. She also said our society, because in the ways that our society hates women and children, and that also is like, it just rang through me.

[30:05]

I think, you know, I studied lots of fantasy theory. I have very articulate words for how and maybe even why this stuff has come about and why women are oppressed in the ways that we are. To name that children are also tremendously devalued in our culture was a name for me. I also felt super wisdom in my experience. But somehow, the groundwork culture does not fully value children. And it explains kind of a lot, actually, if we look at it that way. That that distortion is there, and we're all living in that. We're all living in it, and now we're also living in it. So she offers her story. Some of the identities that she claims and also have been put upon her are that she's a lesbian. Growing up, she grew up in Tasmania, where homosexuality was criminalized until 1997. And I think she's probably around 90, so I know we'll wait for you. So in her lifetime, it was criminal to me.

[31:07]

And she also is, she's a woman, and she's not... a particularly feminized version of Lauren. And she has been assaulted, repeatedly, basically because of that. And she shares that. And she's really clear, like, I'm not doing this to claim a state of being a victim. And I'm not doing this to, I think you're sorry for me. Part of the reason she said she was doing it was because what she would give in her story like that when she was going through the difficult ones in her life. But also, just because it's her story. Just because this particular experience of being human being that she has is her story. And for her to share the focus of her story is to engage with her humanity and mostly with all of our humans.

[32:10]

So to offer, so she also keeps making this funny quip about cubism, which Picasso is known for, right? And I had probably forgotten, but as I was listening, I'm like, oh yeah, cubism. The cubism thing is like, that you could render an image of somebody from all sorts of advantage points at once. But her problem with Picasso was that he imagined that all of those views should be his. And what she's saying is, We have this opportunity now, where we, because, you know, because this woman can do a stand-up thing, I don't know, I think it was in Melbourne or something, we all can see this. We have the opportunity of this multiplicity, of these multiple vantage points on what it is to be human. That is the remedy. Or just like take out on this exercise, like look at this paper, and know what it is, but also know how vast it is. When someone offers a story like that from their pictures, you know, it's just her story. But it is enriching and it changes us, it shakes up our duality.

[33:20]

Well, we can think like, well, you know, if we're a man, we can be like, well, that's not my story. Or if we're not a lesbian, we can think that's not my story. But when someone skillfully offers their story out of their humanity, it is our story because of the ways that we're so inextricably connected. Dualism dehumanizes, it cuts us Foundationally, it cuts us off from our own humanity. And then we go forward in the world and we act with dehumanized version of humanity. So I think our need to ask as people, but also as booksellers, as Zen practitioners, as Americans, is to endeavor to rehumanize. But what do we need to do to undo the dehumanizing training we've got? One of the things I would offer that we can do is listen to other people's stories and vantage points.

[34:22]

And now, like my white brothers and sisters especially, now is a good time to shush. That I think could be useful, that I do to myself. I remind myself to shush. I've been really empowered over the course of my lifetime because of the privilege of being white, I have the power to speak. I try to shush a little and carry it like off. But I also try to shush a little. I miss it. I believe in the stories of other people. And I engage, like, and let them become our stories. Open ourselves to let these stories become our stories. And then they're not other. And we can shake up the dualism of self and other. I didn't grow up in Tasmania. Who cares? We grew up as a human being, and whether a human being shares a story, we can resonate with that story, we can take it and change it, who we are, because of that. So the great treasure of being a human being, for each, every person is the particular ways we bring.

[35:37]

So, we don't forsake what we are. I was thinking about how, as a parent, I'm often called to put myself aside for the well-being and needs, like put my needs, well-being, preferences, for sure, aside for the needs and preferences of well-being of my kids. Because the training that I've had, I can easily fall into doing this in a diluted way, where I toss myself out, I forsake myself. And I'm like, well, I only wake up when I do this, the end of resentment, the variety of resentment. Well, I'm like, shit. That is not my intention, welcoming and caring for my children. It is just real that I will put my needs and preferences of the loss aside. But with decades of practice, like I've been really working on this really hard for a long time, every once in a while.

[36:42]

It becomes available to me. that I can engage with my kids, that I can do the same action of putting myself aside, but not discount myself in it. So I don't make it dualistic. I don't say, like, well, I don't matter what you do. I say, well, I matter, but right now, I can wait for the next 10 years, and I'll be right. The important thing about that isn't just like, oh, that's nice. It's that that is liberation. This is my experience. In those moments, if I could be like, okay, I count, but I'm gonna make this choice to set myself aside, there's this whole array of possible activity that flows from there that's much wider and more broad and freer. Literally, there's like freer options When I'm thinking, ugh, I just have to do this because I'm wrong.

[37:46]

And then the whole world gets really small. And my activity gets really small. And my physical body gets tight. My mind gets tight. So we can do that. We can look for those moments. When we're like, when things are shutting down, you might not even notice it until it's like our shoulders and our jaw, like all closed. And we are caught in thinking that we are an isolated feeling. And that we're not connected. and then we don't, and then because we're not connected, then we don't matter. So, I don't know about you, I find it's hard to be allowed right now. There's some stuff going on at like very high levels of power and influence that it does not at all resonate with what I believe about what it means to be human. And it's hard, if not in the last one, it sounds too soft. I'm familiar. And it's terrifying, actually, to watch people operate on this level with that much power and that much dehumanization.

[38:51]

But one of the things I recommend for myself, so I'm going to share it, so I don't just like, it's like, I don't know, I just want to walk, but I don't. Is that we remember when we're going to begin with valuing ourselves. Cherishing, taking a moment to be like, wow. Not in any kind of soft way, in a profound way. Oh my gosh, I have the opportunity of being here in tomorrow. I'm still here. I don't know how long I'm going to be here. But I'm here right now. I'm in that space between my birth and my death. I'm still here right now. And I am, because I'm connected to all these things, I can influence things. I can change things. And before I go any further, I'm going to sit here, I'm not going to stop and cherish this. is to be close by. Take a second. And then see if doing that, when I look at these other beings around me, I'm cherishing and the reality of our connectedness is more possible.

[40:00]

And in that enlightenment, we illuminate the activity of our life. We'll bring it into the light of the dark. We shine the light in the dark moment. And that's May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:41]

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