This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Good morning. So, thank you for coming. And who's here for the first time? Put your hand. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. You're in exactly the right place and what a strange and interesting thing to be doing on a Saturday morning and I hope you come back to do some more of it. So this is my first time up here and it all looks completely different. I used to sit over there and This is a very different perspective, I've got to tell you.

[01:03]

I used to make announcements after the lecture. Now I'm getting the lecture. So I'm Jean Gallagher, and immediately I've made a Zen mistake because I've said aye. I am something. So as far as Zen is concerned, I can't go around saying I am Jean. I could say my name is Jean. My name, you know, the name people call me is Jean Ellen Mary Catherine Gallagher. But my name's also Mjogan, luminous vowels. and Yakugen, medicine source. These were the names that my teacher, Ryushin, gave me when I was ordained as a priest.

[02:08]

And my name is also Mrs. Larson. My husband, Mr. Larson, is over there. And this old-fashioned thing of calling women by their husband's name, it's still... The norm in Ireland. My mum keeps sending... Hi, Mum. My mum keeps sending letters to Mrs. Larson, which really confuses the front office. What? It's very awkward around here. People arrive with one name, and then they leave with a different name, not necessarily having got married. They leave with a different name. Ryushin arrived as Paul Haller. Those of us who knew the lovely Shuso... Shindo, many years ago as Gita Gayatri, we say Gita Shindo. Shindo, is that okay, Shindo? There's a list in the office of people's names on their driver's license and then people's chosen names.

[03:11]

And you get a new name and you think, okay, am I a new person? All the stories people have about... that name? Are they going to shift them all to the new name? Probably not. The new name is a new identity. But do we have an identity at all? I mean, do we have anything that continues through the name change? And that's kind of what I want to talk about today. So I was I was happy to be asked to do the talk today when David asked me, Kanzan, David Zimmerman, asked me to do the talk. And I thought, March 19th, cool, that's just after St. Patrick's Day. There you go. But St. Patrick's Day mysteriously has more significance for me.

[04:13]

St. Patrick's Day, I thought, I'll remember that, and I also thought, it's a very long time away, the... world might end before then before i have to get up here and do a talk so the world hasn't ended and saint patrick's day happened and i thought well you know saint patrick's day i'm irish my teacher's irish we have this whole irish thing going on um it's my identity it's kind of reassuring to have an identity And the thing is, I've only started, I only began to realize that I was Irish when I stopped being in Ireland. When I was in Ireland, it was just being alive. I developed an Irish persona when I came here. I'm only Irish in opposition to people who aren't Irish.

[05:16]

This sounds kind of simple, but it's interesting. It's an interesting thing to notice. Last week, I saw people wearing T-shirts that said, kiss me, I'm Irish. And my friends joke about this, like, kiss me, I'm Irish. But we don't wear kiss me, I'm Irish T-shirts in Ireland. It would be like saying kiss me, I'm human in Ireland. So it doesn't have any meaning when you're not, when you're not in a place, it doesn't have any meaning when you're not in a place where there are others, where there are differences. Is it ever helpful to be a fixed thing, to be an identity, to be a, you know,

[06:22]

Irish female priest, wife, daughter, English-speaking, you know, immensely privileged. These things have helped me in various ways. They've helped me in my life in various ways. And they're also barriers to connection, to insight, to intimacy. the stories about me, the identity categories that I fit into. People say, I hear people say, I try to avoid saying, but I say myself, I say things like, well, I'm the kind of person who never, you know, eats candy. That's not actually true. But I'm the kind of person who does or doesn't do this.

[07:24]

It's not helpful for me to be a kind of person, and it's not helpful for me to think of you as a kind of person. If I can see you, if I can see through the kind of person I think you are, then we have a much better chance of meeting. of coming together, if I'm not filtering you through my set of algorithms about what kind of person, what men do, what older people do, what Irish people do, it's not fun to have fixed views. The beginner's mind, temple, name, is a reminder of that, of that great teaching by Suzuki Roshi that the child's mind, the interest and curiosity that small children and great Zen masters bring to the world is the open mind of the beginner that we go, oh, wow, look at that.

[08:47]

Look at that. I thought they were the kind of person who... And look what they did. The great way, as Paul was saying recently, the great way is not difficult for the one who has no preferences, the one who's not separating things into this and that, right and wrong, good and bad, me and not me. The boundary between self and other is quite porous. in this teaching. And underneath that carapace, that shell of the self, beneath that screen on which all these identities play, there's this huge, empty space, this unspeakable, unnameable space where

[09:50]

creativity and beauty live, where it's the field of growth for art and poetry, music. It's where love arises in that great field of emptiness. So the myogon Part of my name happened a few years ago when I was ordained. And the ceremony is called Shuke Tokuda. We're going to have one in a few weeks for Kim. It's very exciting. My friend is going to be ordained. It's my Dharma sister. And the ceremony is called, it's an interesting reminder, it's called the home leaving ceremony. It's called leaving home. The priest leaves home, leaves the identity that has been created behind, breaks through that and ventures out on a new path.

[11:03]

So maybe you could think I left home in 2007 when I left Ireland to come and live in a monastery. But I didn't really leave. I brought... I brought a whole set of ideas, a whole set of preconceptions with me. I brought that mind that I had created, I brought that with me to the monastery. Wherever I go, there I am, as I think John Kabat-Zinn said. I can't escape. I can't escape the self. So the robe and the priest thing, it's a vow to leave that identity behind, become an open space of identity.

[12:12]

So it was an interesting time to be in a monastery. I entered the monastery in 2007, and when I came out four years later, the world had kind of changed. I went in, and I left Ireland, and I brought a rather clunky laptop with me. It was about this big. And I didn't use it for four years. And a phone that was also quite large had an Irish... an Irish connection. And we were down there with no Wi-Fi and no cell phone signals. And in fact, I had been kind of fascinated to discover in San Francisco that people were sitting in coffee shops working on their computers. This was a whole new idea coming from Ireland. We were very excited because we had broadband. We didn't have to dial up our computer. Some of you are too young to remember this. But anyway... In the distant past, the internet was basically done by carrier pigeons.

[13:18]

It was very, very slow. Very, very slow. And I came out. Okay, so I came out of Tassajara. And in Tassajara is like 62 people standing in line politely waiting for one phone. That was how I kept in touch with people. I called my parents every few weeks. And I came out and my sister was talking about something called Twitter. I was like, excuse me? We come out blinking and vulnerable and open. We come out having spent four years or three months or whatever, bowing to everybody. I came out and we stopped at a Chevron station to get gas and I used the bathroom and I bowed bow to the door. And then I thought, got to stop that, got to stop those kind of things. But it's that kind of space, that openness, that receiving everything, that meeting everything, that child's mind, in a way, after four years of the only news sources are very old copies of the New York Times and Shambhala's son.

[14:37]

That was our cutting-edge news. And we came out. I came out, and I discovered everybody was looking at their hand. There was this new thing that was going on. People... were contemplating their hands rather than the world. It was very startling. It was a very interesting thing to be plunged back into not having seen it evolved. The rest, everybody else in the world, were being boiled slowly like lobsters. They didn't realize what was happening, but those of us who met it suddenly for the first time thought, this is really strange. And... I was reassured. I was told, oh, it's about connection. We're connecting with people. We're all sitting in a row, looking at our hands, and connecting with people online in other countries.

[15:40]

And I am not dissing this. I can Skype my family. I can see my niece and nephews on Facebook. I have connections all over the world that I didn't know I had. So it's not a problem in that way, but it was a problem for my little naked, vulnerable beginner's mind. I went, wow, wow, look at this. Look at this. And keep looking at this. I got a smartphone, I got on Facebook, I started playing words with friends. I was very good at words with friends. It was very consoling to be winning at something all the time. I was like, yeah. And I was also sewing, and a case is this, I was sewing a priest robe, which takes a lot of time and a lot of stitches. And every stitch, I took refuge in Buddha and Dharma and Sangha.

[16:41]

It's an amazing practice to sew a priest robe. It takes about a year for most of us. Some of us do it a little quicker. And I was finding it was taking a really long time because in my free time, rather than sewing my robe, I was checking my Facebook page and I was playing words with friends. And it all came to a sudden end when I thought, I don't want this to be my life. And I realized that what I do is what I become. that I'd be falling asleep, and the image that would shimmer in front of my eyes was letters clicking together on a screen. Tiny, bright images from a phone screen. Someone recently pointed out to me...

[17:46]

social media, that connections like this, that they can be useful, and that they're also like a drug. Drugs can be useful. Different drugs can be useful. But that using social media to help overcome loneliness, for example, is like using heroin to calm myself down. Without the heroin, I can't become calm then. Without the social media, if I become completely absorbed with my screen, I'm not learning any social skills and how to connect in real, in the body, in the person. And I'm also not learning all those small, subtle, almost undetectable things

[18:47]

signals that people give off, with which people tell us how to communicate with them. The big miscommunications on social media that happen because we don't get that someone was being ironic. And we've seen the nightmares that arise from that. So I'm thinking about Identity in there. So what I look at on my screen gets recorded, and then Google and Amazon and other apps start sending me things that relate to the things I'm looking at on my screen. So when I was the Sheikah here, when I was the housekeeper, I looked at a lot of things like brooms and beds. And Amazon... decided that that was who I was, and I still get lots of messages that you might like this, about cleaning fluid.

[19:52]

And sometimes I look at something, I look at a book, because I want to see who wrote it. I'm now the web editor, ironically, I'm the web editor, and I want to see the spelling of somebody's name. So I check the title of their book, and then I get all their other books. And that's great. And I look at them and I think, oh, hey, I might be interested in that. But it's still an algorithm of my identity. It's still some very smart person, way smarter than me, figured out that this is who I am and will keep sending me the things that reinforce who I am. So it's Limiting is what I want to say about it. It's limiting my life and limiting my world. And I recently re-read, hadn't read it for many years, hadn't read it before, since before I went to the monastery, I recently re-read Not Always So, which is the other collection of Suzuki Roshi's lectures, the second collection.

[21:12]

And in that... he has a talk, he gave a talk that was entitled something like, Life is like a movie. And he used the metaphor, which was new for him, I mean, this radical idea, he used the metaphor of a movie. Our brains are operating like movies. The colors and the lights, and we watch this, and we get convinced by it and distracted by it. But what he said was, the practice, our zen practice, is to have a pure white screen. That that's what we're doing. That's what Zazen is about, is looking behind the movie to the screen that underlies it. And I was really struck by that. When I read it again, I thought, wow.

[22:13]

He didn't know how much our eyes were going to be flickering back and forth, watching actual movies all day long on our little screens. He didn't know, and yet he had that prescience, maybe. He saw something in that way that humans have, that thing that we do of getting lost in our movies. In Tassajara, in the monastery, obviously, there are no movies, there are no TV screens, and there's no internet, and people who haven't been there say, well, what do you do in the evenings? And we go and sit Zazen and watch the movies that play inside our minds, these entrancing movies in which we're generally the star, the hero, the victim, the... You know those movies. And after years, sometimes, certainly in my case, after years of doing that, I began to realize how predictable this movie was and that if it was in a movie theater, I certainly wouldn't want to sit through it again and again and again.

[23:31]

And that what was way more interesting for me was what was behind the movie. the pure white screen that is the ground of creativity and love and poetry has been colonized for me, for the most part, by the really smart people who write programs for the internet. So... My practice has become a putting down the phone kind of practice. How can I be in my day and only check my email once? How can I work just between the hours of work and not always respond to every overture

[24:40]

that's made to me. It's incredibly seductive. He is. Suzuki Roshi, I hear Suzuki Roshi said, I couldn't find it anywhere, but I hear he said something like, if there was anything else as powerful as sexual attraction, people would never get enlightened. I think he said that. I'm looking at Ed as the authority in this. Paul, they're probably like... I think you made that up. But anyway, I'm going with it. If there was anything else as powerful as sexual attraction, nobody would ever get enlightened. I think the Internet is. I think it's as powerful. I think it's as seductive. I think in a lot of cases it's taking the place off or consoling us for the absence of. It's... It's a big, powerful force, and I'm encouraging us to pay attention to it, to see it as a big, powerful force.

[25:55]

I had something else I wanted to say. Yeah, the white screen. The simplicity of that is... what I was first drawn to in Zen, I had started sitting in other more decorative practices, a little more pink and orange going on. It was the simplicity and the minimalism of Zen that really attracted me, that really spoke to me when I first... heard the Heart Sutra, no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, with nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajna paramita, the teaching about emptiness. When I first heard that, it was like, ah, that, something that underlies the decoration, the words of

[27:06]

something that underlies the concepts. And even though this is all pretty fancy and elaborate and decked out, robes and statues and bells, it's a framework, a container. It's an elaborate container in which I can sit on my cushion and experience the emptiness. and experience the white screen. We sit with half-open eyes in this practice. And it's a really good physical reminder of the world and me being all one. I'm not separate. I'm not closing my eyes and getting lost in my movie, or opening my eyes and looking to see what's going on, as if that were a movie too.

[28:07]

I'm just sitting with half-open eyes, receiving the information that the universe is sending me. The teaching of emptiness, the silence and stillness at the heart of Zen, has drawn me in and given me a place to land. And yet it has no guarantees. It doesn't absolutely promise enlightenment or anything like that. just the feeling that this is a space of openness, that my body is not different from the air that touches it, from the cushion and the room and all of the people in it, that I am not separate, that I am not Irish and I'm not Jeanne,

[29:31]

I'm not Miyoko. I'm connected with all of you in this really deep, intimate way that we're all this collection of molecules rushing through space, a bundle of energy, a lot of energy in my case, and organized in this very particular and quite tentative way, and it can all fall apart at any moment. And eventually it all will. The whole thing will. So the koan that comes to me again and again and that I've spoken about before and I really enjoy because it's so different from what I was taught, what I learned as a child, is Case 20 in the Book of Serenity, and it's a monk, a monk, a monk, and a master.

[30:41]

And Dijong says, where are you going? Fian says, around on pilgrimage. Dijong says, what is the purpose of pilgrimage? And Vayan says, I don't know. And Dijong says, not knowing is most intimate. So he gets this gold star for saying, I don't know. I don't know was the best response. I don't know. I don't know anything. I don't know why I'm up here saying this, talking to you about something, about not knowing. I don't know is like the direct antithesis of Google and Wikipedia and the world of...

[31:55]

finding things out by tapping my phone. I don't know is where I want to sit. I don't know who I am, who you are. I don't know anything, and I'm ready, I'm ready to hear what you have to say. I'm ready to listen to what you have to tell me. there's a questions and answers opportunity in the dining room after this and I'm delighted that I get to hear what other people have to say because the sound of my own voice is kind of challenging and I'm going to invite particularly new people to come and visit back there with a cup of tea afterwards.

[32:55]

This is the kind of thing I used to say when I was the Eno, when I was over there. I would say, there's a questions and answers session that way. And now I'm saying it here. Now I understand what it's for. Come and meet. Come and meet each other. Come and meet me. Come and meet who we are in Sangha and community. Having a cup of tea and a chat. So thank you everybody for coming. Thanks for inviting me to do this. I will be happy to hear what you have to say. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[33:57]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:00]

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