Good morning. Can you hear me? Not very well? How about that? I thought because today we're almost upon the winter solstice, or maybe the other way around, the winter solstice is upon us, it might be fitting to say a few words about this time of year, how it relates to us both on the physical and maybe psychological plane.

[01:10]

And why it's significant that we celebrate the changing, the turning of the light, the four points of the balancing points between the light force, so to speak, and the dark force, the night force and the day force. It doesn't take too much imagination for us at this time of year, in the northern hemisphere at least, the colder latitudes especially, to think what it must have been for our ancestors who lived in the dark, in the darkening time of year, to wait for that critical moment when there's the turning about of the apparent sun path, and the seasons, the change of the seasons.

[02:11]

So I think it's appropriate that we have celebrations and ceremonies around this time of year. I know at Tassajara I love this time of year especially because for those of you who have been there, you know up in the mountains you go, it's way down in the bottom of this canyon, and so in the dark of the year it is really dark. And that sense of inward turning, that sense of introspectiveness, and the way the light looks at this time of year, the particular way the shadows fall on the hills, we can see that here as well. The long shadows that appear early in the afternoon, the whole mood evoked around that particular time of year, a kind of hunger for and a longing which is not exactly expressible except to maybe ceremonies. And so it's not so unusual that they had the Saturnalia in the pagan days so-called,

[03:18]

and that the Christians used this time of the year for the birth, and that Buddha's Enlightenment Day is on the 8th day of December. It seems to be an appropriate time to celebrate the enlightenment, the return of light. It's a hard time of year for a great number of individuals in not only our time in society, but I think worldwide a kind of phenomenon that occurs at this time of year around Christmas. We think maybe it's because of our incessant compulsion to celebrate, to go out and buy gifts and take care of our obligations at this time of year and fulfill our need for ceremony. And that's part of it, you know, the shopping, the crowds, the expense. But even without that, even in the mountains,

[04:20]

even when you're alone, you could feel this sense of kind of collapse of light, collapsing onto the self, looking for some corner of brightness, some part of illumination, some warmth. A lot of people suffer pain, psychological pain and depression when the light becomes dimmer in the winter time. And we kind of cling to the aspect of the light and the return of the light. At the same time, you know, in the teachings, both East and West, but particularly I think in the East, the teachings of darkness, it's kind of the teaching of the unborn, the unfathomable, the ultimate. And what is seen in the light of day is that which can be discriminated by our consciousness. And so, you know, those things that go bump in the night,

[05:25]

that feeling of fear that we have, being alone in the dark, is also that great opportunity that can be celebrated along with this return of light of letting go of the fear of the darkness and, as the metaphor has it, to fall back into the darkness that is always behind us. Always 180 degrees of darkness behind us, wherever you turn your head. And to just be able to fall back as if you were on the edge of a cliff at this turning point. Surrender to it and let go. Well, you know, falling back into darkness takes not only a lot of faith, but maybe a lot of stupidity, depending on the situation. Because we have billions of years of survival by which to protect ourselves, and so this idea of letting go, welcoming the darkness and falling back into it,

[06:29]

letting it embrace us in a psychological sense. A kind of sacrifice of our ego, giving up and letting go, should also be, and is perhaps, an important part of the rituals that arise at this time of year. Just as, you know, six months ago we were celebrating the day forests. Summer solstice, when everything is in full bloom and nights are short and everything is warm and convivial, crops are growing. And at the very point, you know, the light begins to diminish. At the very point it's at its fullest, it begins to diminish. Just at this point, at its very lowest ebb, now it begins to augment and grow. So we say in this teaching, right in light there is darkness, but don't confront it as darkness. Right in darkness there is light, but don't see it as light. Light and dark are relative to one another like forward and backward steps.

[07:34]

We go back and forth with this light, you know. We have also, of course, the day, from day to day we have the coming and going of the light. And the more pain we have, the more we wait for the light. I've had that opportunity of late to notice this particular phenomenon. I had the opportunity to experience pain on a level where philosophy became irrelevant. A minor operation as things go, but in a place so delicate and almost so unmentionable that it's embarrassing, you know, it's that kind of operation. It's not a gallant kind of thing to talk about. But the interesting thing about the pain, the cycles of pain, not only does one's philosophy go, not only do you find a hundred new ways of grinding your teeth waiting for the light, but you have an opportunity to, at the same time, to watch yourself, to watch your mind,

[08:41]

to watch this total experience arising. Total Buddha in pain. Beyond comfort, beyond solace, beyond consolation, just pure pain. Waiting for that moment of release that will come with a dawn, or with a relief that you can get from certain prescribed drugs that the doctor gives you when you go home. And then, like the return of the light, the pain goes away and you feel almost normal again, right? And you forget rather quickly what the darkness and what the pain is. Get back in your normal routines until it returns again. And then once more you're caught up, one is caught up in this kind of anguish and pain. Physical pain, sickness, old age and death, which we all face. They were sitting, say, Sheen, at the same time down here.

[09:43]

But I was doing my own, say, Sheen. And it was just as intense as anything that I have done, sitting in this zendo or tasahara for seven days on end, both in the literal sense and otherwise. And when there's no recourse from pain, whether you're sitting here in zazen waiting for the bell in intense pain during extended sitting, or whether you're lying in bed waiting for something to change, that is really an exquisite, delicate moment in which one has an opportunity to study just how deep this teaching is of our life and how much of it is just some kind of intellectual stories that we tell ourselves. So, you know, I guess the point of all this is the dark of the year and the pain that we feel in the sense of that being not something to avoid

[10:48]

and celebrate the end of, but something to not exactly rejoice in, but be grateful for. And, you know, as soon as the pain is relieved, if you've ever had a bad back or a kind of chronic pain of some sort, you think, if I can just walk again, if I can just go to the bathroom normally or any of those things that we take for granted, I'll never complain again, right? I'll just be happy to be a functional old me without any special philosophies. I'll just really feel cool and easy. Just please let it be like that again, you know. And you make this little bargain, so. I promise to sit every morning. And, of course, 10 minutes after, well, maybe if you've been practicing, 20 minutes after. Something steps on your life and you forget. Rilke says always at the critical moment I forget. At that critical moment, oh, it's all gone again, and you're back into your usual habitual reactive mode of dealing with the world.

[11:53]

But eventually the world wins in the sense eventually our pain will return, whether it's in Zazen or at the moment of illness or the loss of a loved one. And we have to face the long night. So facing the long night and being in the long night and celebrating the long night is what we're doing right now at this time of year. And appreciating the opportunity to do that, do it together. Exchange gifts, bow to altars, sing Christmas carols, rejoice in just being what we are, while we are, and letting life live the life of life and going on with it. And not trying to adhere to one's dualistic idea, I'll be all right,

[12:59]

I promise I'll keep the vows when I feel better. We're actually probably keeping our vows, if that's the truth, or being true to ourselves and our reality when we're suffering a little bit. And so for that reason, although we don't make a cult of pain, let's hope, and not make that the game plan in our life, we have to honor it. A big part of honoring our life is to honor our pain, and then of course to feel, extend it out and to know that all people are suffering, in some sense like that. Ahem. The old astrologer said that the night force was the collective force. In the northern hemispheres when people needed to cooperate when winter was coming, needed to band together and form groups for the sake of communal safety.

[14:04]

And so the rituals around the turning points of the sun, and living very elementally in nature. Winter was a natural time for us to do that. So I hope we enjoy it this year. If I'm rambling a bit, it's because I normally do. But today I ramble even a little bit more because I've got some of this painkiller in me, so. I tend to hear my words go out there in a dire way. Alan Watts had a wonderful poem about this. He said, a little jingle, The stars in their courses have no destination. The train of events will arrive at no station. The inmost and ultimate self of us all

[15:10]

is dancing on nothing and having a ball. But when you're really suffering, that having a ball part, you soon have a little less of the ball, right? Beam me up, Captain Kirk. Another thing that I notice is that pain softens me. It makes us very hard sometimes and very reactive at moments. We become quite harsh in the midst of our pain. But overall, if we're sensitive to it, at least in my experience, I feel a kind of softening, kind of giving up, a surrender in a soft way, if I can surrender to my pain. And then the slings and arrows of other things that come toward me in the form of you and it and them and they and those and so on, it's not so sharp, not so poignant. In fact, I feel I can embrace it almost. So, sufferers of the world, unite.

[16:14]

We could enjoy ourselves together. Well, I think we're going to have some discussion after we have something to eat and drink, but I really have to fill up the time, you see, because they need time to put the tea together. That's actually what I'm doing right now. And last time when I stopped too soon, I caught a little bit of criticism for not giving the tea people a chance to get the spread on the table. So, this is kind of filler time. You just made that up. Maybe Rin's here. Is Rin here? And if our suffering is for anything,

[17:19]

it is the same as our practice, which is to soften. Soften ourselves. And at the same time hold ourselves, you know, in a certain dignified human uprightness in the middle of it. That's not easy, is it? I find it very difficult not to want to scream at somebody in the midst of my suffering. I'm a little too wise to myself now to blame it on anybody, and even on myself, you know. I could even say, well, you idiot, you should have had this taken care of 10 years ago, and so on. But that's an old number too, you see. So finally I just surrender and say, well, it's time for me to suffer this X number amount of suffering in the world. It goes around, you know. It's your turn. You had years and years of free from it, and now you're getting your share. You know, it's like a bill comes to the house, it says, here, you got seven days and seven nights of new ways of learning

[18:20]

how to claw the wall, chew your teeth, bite your lips, and so on. And you can either resist it or get into it, you know. And so all those books I had read about Jon Kabat-Zinn, you know, how to live with pain, and so on, a long way, all of them went right out the window. Couldn't remember any of it except just breathe, you know. Just get the 10 and start again. And then you think, how many people in the world right now are hoping to get to 10, hoping to get to 10, so they can somehow endure and go on with your life, you know. Wow. So I guess I'm not trying to, I'm not a pain salesman, you know, at all. But I do think this is a good time of year to look at it. Spend Christmas alone, and no Christmas cards, and nobody calls you. You know, have you ever had that? It's raining outside, right? It's like an old John Garfield movie. Kind of gray, and you really feel the emptiness, you see, and there's no support. All those consolations that we have are stripped away,

[19:22]

ripped off from under you. Sooner or later, it's going to be coming around. So that's one of the reasons we practice, be ready for that, you know. Not be such a bummer for yourself and other people. And now, you know, I'm at the age where I get together with old people, and we have what is called an organ recital. They tell me about what their organ problems are, and I tell them about mine. We spend most of the time doing that. And that becomes a whole way of life, almost, you see. It's a kind of status game of one-upmanship. If you think that's bad, wait until you get to the prostate, that's really going to, you know. Well, it's good we can laugh at it a little bit, you know. What time is it? Huh?

[20:24]

1040. I've been practicing a long time, you wouldn't believe it, but I really have been. And once upon a time, I knew all about real subtle things in the Buddha Dharma. But again, they all went out the window this week, you know. I just forgot every one of them. And I think it was time for it all to blow away, you see. Get really stupid again, really dumb, you know. Don't have any answers anymore. It's just, oh, here it is. And can you sit with it? Can you be with it? Can you be even agreeable with people with it? And you say, yeah. So maybe that's all we have to learn, how to do that. And you can say that, you know, in many different ways, eloquently, poetically, you know. But it's just the practice of doing that, isn't it? A hundred new ways to grind your teeth and relax. And one of the things about right and light there is darkness.

[21:48]

Don't confront it as darkness. You know, sometimes we're feeling really dark in our mood and so on. And we cast a kind of a shadow over other people's light that way. It can be very oppressive to use our downers to curdle the vibe, as it were. Walk into a room suffering, you know, and everybody feels it. You can feel the energy kind of. But at the same time, we should see that right in our happiness, because there's unhappiness, we see this duality. Without pain, there's no pleasure. Without pleasure, we see that, you know. And even though you can't see it, you know, the two sides at once, you can begin by practicing to realize that right in light there is darkness. Right in light there is suffering. Right in discrimination, discriminating mind, there's darkness, pain, confusion. And right in the, you know, in the inchoate or the unseen or the, you know,

[22:52]

that which you can't see or feel behind us is the possibility of the new, the light, the new emergence. That whole feeling in our life that everybody has and knows, you know, to kind of flow with that. Especially in the painful times, that's our practice. That's my practice, anyway. And the best time to do it is when the chips are down on the table, you know. The best time to study anger is when you're really mad, right? It's not when you're sitting around the table discussing anger philosophically. It's when all at once things go against you and the anger comes up right then. That's the time to study it. That's when the light and dark come together, you see. Well, you know, I made some vows to myself. And one of the vows was I would never preach and I would never scold. But I've been preaching and scolding ever since I put these robes on.

[23:53]

And I'm going to keep promising. I'm going to keep trying to find a kind of middle way between preaching and scolding. You know, you actually have something to say. And then you can take it away from here. And mull it over for a few days. But the best talks are the ones that you forget immediately, anyway. And you just let them go. So, are we ready yet? Let's do it. Intention. What this particular period calls for, which is, I guess, for me to answer questions. About the talk. Or any questions. Any questions. That pertain to... Any questions. Well, actually, I have a request. Could you read that, recite the... Poem? Poem again. Helen Watts, yeah. He used to write a lot of jingles. And this was one of them.

[24:56]

The stars in their courses have no destination. The train of events will arrive at no station. The inmost and ultimate self of us all is dancing on nothing and having a ball. That is good. Yes. Yes. To absorb the practice? To absorb the pain. Well, you know, my experience with pain when it's really intense is that there's really nothing you can do to try to control except don't waste energy wailing, I mean, or, you know... Resisting. Resisting. Don't spend a lot of energy resisting it. You will resist it.

[25:58]

Of course, it's natural, but you'll notice if you're breathing, if you can follow your breath when you're in a particularly intense physical and I think psychological pain as well, follow that breath all the way down and all the way back. Just following the breath. You notice after a couple of breaths that how much you're actually holding. I mean, how much you've tensed up the muscles of your body, which is what causes more pain, of course, the more you tense up muscles. So, I think that helps just to kind of breathe into it a little bit, you know. And without going too far, without using that as another device to try to escape, you know, you just... because you can't escape it. That's the thing about intense pain on whatever plane, is that it finally demands engagement of one kind or another. And, of course, dealing with pain, I mean, taking drugs for it,

[27:01]

like prescription drugs or morphine when you're in the hospital, is that you have to be able to deal with the pain first before you can begin to heal yourself. And I think that's interesting psychologically, too, is that to really heal ourselves, we have to go right into the heart of pain, whatever it is, like it or not, and deal with it on its own terms, which is meet me, like that, you know. In other words, to be there for it, for yourself on that level. Is that... Probably a little bit more on the psychological level. Well, know that no philosophy will be of any help. Nothing that anybody tells you will be of much help. So, the thing about psychological... The thing about all pain is that pain is contractive. What you feel, both psychologically and physically, is an imploding or a collapsing in on yourself, so to speak.

[28:02]

It's like a dark hole. And you can feel this density, you know. The thing about pain is that you can feel that in a world which in some level is just, you know, in a astrophysical way. I mean, if you really looked at the universe, it's all this stuff just kind of floating in space, but the way it is experienced is that it's very dense and substantial and hard. And pain is about that hardness, you know. The harder things get, the more painful they feel. We even use that word, it's hard. It's hard for me to do this. It's intense. So, how do we work with density, you see? What do we do about that sense of... And the first rule, if you can call it a rule or guideline or reality about it, is that you have to be right in the center. You have to meet it totally. Be willing to do that. That's not easy.

[29:03]

That doesn't mean that you don't take drugs to alleviate it or that you... But if you take drugs to alleviate pain, that's fine. You won't get hooked on the drugs usually because it's just a response to pain. But if the feel-good that comes with drugs or the kind of dissociated, kind of vagueness and fogginess that comes with it begins to be another comfort zone to hide from pain, that's the problem. Because sooner or later you have to deal with pain. And we always want to deal with it later. I think it's human. How about tomorrow, you know? A lot of people are depressed this time of year. It's a very heavy time for people. And as I try to indicate, however poorly, we tend to find psychological, I should say, sociological, economic sociological reasons for it rather than the really psychological reasons for it.

[30:08]

Say that again. The psychological reasons. When the light gets... And physiological reactions to the light force become very, very slight when the sun is way on the horizon and we don't get a lot of sunlight in our life and so on. Things get dark. Look at Northern European art, you know. Think of Munch, you know Munch, those pictures? Edvard Munch. You know the famous one? It's kind of that time of year, you know, when the sun is always, you know, it's very... Yeah. Pardon? So what I think I'm here to say is that we have to pay attention to this time of the year because the conditions with the light and the weather

[31:13]

all bring us into a possibility of depression and sadness and internalizing our lives. And if we try to divert ourselves through shopping or a nice dinner or a movie or any of the things like that, we find some dissatisfaction. So are you... No, I don't think so. I mean, I don't think that you should not divert yourself. I mean, you've got to have some fun in life, you know. Go out and shop and enjoy the lights and, you know, play like you do, like we do. So I don't know. I'm just saying that this is not a pitch for suffering. This is a pitch to get out of suffering, to meet, but the only way, paradoxically, you get out of suffering

[32:18]

is to meet suffering face on. In certain times of the year, more people, I think, are probably depressed in the winter solstice than are depressed in the summer solstice, although there is a kind of summer doldrums syndrome that also is cyclical and appears in people's psyches at changing points. But just as spring is resurrection, you see, you know, the light force overcomes the dark force. Now days are longer than night in the springtime. That means that light now is now on the upswing. The dark power, the unseen, you know, our dimension opens up. We can get a full 180 degree view. But when we're in the middle of the winter solstice, zero degrees Capricorn, you know, Capricorn was the symbol of the seagoat, the one that starts at the very bottom and climbs all over the bottom of the sea to the highest mountain. It means that now the light is slowly coming crawling back for the next six months.

[33:18]

And our whole spirit, you know, when I was at Tassajara, I loved the fall practice period because the whole place was conducive to to being in a very confined, dark, womb-like, wet, wintery landscape. And those lamps you would light at 3.30 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon in the winter solstice time just seemed to radiate more light than, you know, light really looks rich in the dark of the year. So you have the feeling that when you're practicing, you're really returned in on something that you couldn't see, that you can't get hold of, that's ineffable, inexplicable, and so on. And that when I would start, come back after the break and start the spring practice period, already you're looking forward. You see the light's coming back now. You're looking, people are talking about the summer that's coming and the spring that's coming. But what we kind of love about this time of year and feel is this density of this darkness that brings us together,

[34:21]

celebrate around a little bit of light. We need both of those, you see. This is not an argument for one over another. This is the argument for sameness and difference as being two sides of the same coin. Pain and pleasure and darkness and light and the balancing of those. And it's wonderful to see that in our seasons because the way the world is tilted toward the sun and so on, we get this little wobble and so we have the seasons, you know. Day and night are equal and then the light force comes back or it diminishes and we can actually experience that in ourselves. In fact, if we become sensitive enough on a fundamental level, you can experience what you call diurnal, the daily cycle of light coming and going. And the lunation cycle, we have those three cycles in our life. Every month, you know, the full moon, watching it gather light and then diminishing and so on. Those, although they're symbols for growth, for change,

[35:22]

you know, with no beginning, no end, but always a stage of being, of full light and then darkness and not seeing anything. This is part of our, I mean, this, since time out of mind has been going on, this is part of our psychology. We experience our life itself, our moods. And rather than, you know, wanting all light, you know, all sunshine makes a desert, you know, they say. So we need the balance. We need the, we want, we crave actually the balance. And that one moment in the spring and autumn when the two sides are exactly equal, you know, day and night, just for a moment, there's equilibrium. You see, just that moment of equilibrium, and then it's gone. Passes over that point. Got it? Whoop, there it went. No, I think I'm, what I'm just, all I'm trying to very vaguely point to is that we should sensitize ourselves, we should, I don't want to say that, we, you know, we are sensitized to the seasons.

[36:24]

And then we've loaded all the ceremonial stuff on top of it so that becomes a drag for a lot of people and this time of year and becomes an extra thing to have to deal with in an already overburdened life of things. But deeper than that, and I'm trying to point to, is this contraction of light. And that we embrace it with both hands instead of just with one, you see? Bring it together. I like how you're describing this. I find for myself this time of year that I do feel it turning inward. Yeah. And there's a jarring effect of the obligations, family obligations and so on that I'm expected to participate in. And that produces a tension in me. Because I've, my family's in Los Angeles. Right. I feel like staying in my house

[37:26]

with the fireplace and reflecting and reading and turning inward and looking at the year and goals for next year and everything. But at the same time, I think about more than just myself and I think of the others. Well that's the whole point, you see, of that statement, right in light there is darkness but don't confront it as darkness. In other words, don't make a big deal of that. We always were meeting with people and so rather than making our personal egoic sense around this, the natural need to become the contrary pull toward socialization at this time where we want to comfort each other around the fireplace and have some conviviality, you know, all the crops, the work is done, the old agrarian societies, you can now eat the harvest, the stuff that you had pickled and saved and enjoy it together. And not to write,

[38:29]

you know, right in the midst of the light and right in the darkness but to know it's there and right in the darkness not to, you know, we've got to lighten up, you've got to lighten up, buddy, not do that either. Find this balance between the two. So you have to meet your parents, you have to do these social things and the practice is trying to find out how to do that with some kind of grace, you know. I think that's it because what makes me depressed is that we give ourselves up. Millions of reasons. This is a wonderful time of year because there's a lot of reasons to beat ourselves up. You know, there's more suicide prevention, you know, there's more people calling this time of year than almost any other time. And incidentally, do you know what the leading indicator, the leading indicator, this is not cause now, this is the leading indicator of sudden death? Monday morning at nine o'clock.

[39:34]

More people die suddenly at that time than any other. So that's very interesting that with our ideas, you see, about what we like, I like this, I don't like that, I want the light, I don't want the dark, I want this job, I don't want that job, all my dissatisfactions and so on come up. The ideas that we have about ourselves and the world, and it's coming to me that part of my confusion at this time of year is that for me, it's a new year, it's meant for beach and sun, so that you have your culture, your tradition, out of sync with your physical reality of what's going on in the world at that time. And although I do understand the depth of the moral hemisphere,

[40:35]

involvement with the winter and the summer solstices, so much of humanity lives within the tropics, and I can't help thinking that this is sort of eccentricity about this year-end stresses of culture. Well, these were developments that actually developed this way of scrutinizing, looking at the seasons and then extrapolating out of that psychological states and so on. This is a development from the northern latitudes. You live more right under the sun where things were equal all year round, tropically speaking, and so on. Immigration moved out from that into experience in not only the seasons but in their own response to the seasons,

[41:37]

which is hard. This becomes culturally, and then if they're given to intellectualization and analysis of that kind of thing, we do in the northern hemisphere a lot. And by northern I mean even Egypt and so on where these things started. You were speaking of pain, particularly as I understood like physical pain, but there was a sort of second-hand or even third-hand pain when somebody who is dear to you is in emotional pain and you want to respond but you find the sheer difficulties of sharing another's emotional pain. So what is your question? A particular instance

[42:41]

I'm thinking of is that my daughter's son has leukemia and although I'm a synthetic child, my focus is on my daughter and the immense emotional stress that I have to deal with. And Well, so you have to deal with what you're talking about is dealing with your emotional distress around somebody else's pain. I mean, part of our pain is other people's pain, isn't it? A big part of our life is you can't feel my suffering pain, you can't feel my emotional pain, we can't pick up each other's emotional pain. But one of the things about practice is that we first of all have to acknowledge

[43:42]

we're not in control of certain things and not try to fix it. We're not trying to make it better, not to make it worse, but just to see it for what it is. And what is it, you see? Everybody's going, every single person in this room is going to go through pain of that sort and even if you block off yourself, if you set yourself up in such a way that you stonewall the world, emotionally speaking, that's an enormous kind of pain in itself, isn't it? So the question always gets back to how do we deal with pain? And one of the most terrible pains is of course the pain for a mother and a daughter or for close family or husbands and wives when you feel that other person's pain and you kind of beside yourself because you feel helpless in the face of it. And the thing then is that not beat yourself up, have compassion, and the compassion has to be for you, too, in the midst of that. Be very compassionate,

[44:42]

very soft, soft at heart for your own pain around that, very gentle with yourself, no blame, anything like that mixed with it. That's adding, we call that in our practice putting a head on another head or negative negativity, which is to say, you know, my wife, for example, let's say, is suffering and oh God, if I had been a better person, if this and if that, maybe beating myself up around is putting unnecessary pain on the pain that's ample enough already. Rather than do that, let that aspect go and just feel the pain. Empathize with it, be open to it, and respond to it functionally however you can, of course, enabling her to live her life as comfortably as she can. But in the end, she will have to suffer her pain about the child and you will have to suffer it with her and they will suffer

[45:44]

because mother is suffering. Yeah. In Buddhism, you know, there are three kinds of pain. There are many kinds of pain, but actually there are three basic pains. One is called the pain that arises out of ignorance, the pain of the fact that we don't pay attention to our lives and that the world kicks us around to the degree that we set up situations without being conscious of what we're doing and get hurt by them. It's a very ordinary way of neurotic suffering. The second kind of pain is called you get a little smarter than that and you practice and so on. So you get what's called alternating pain. In other words, you practice for a while and you see some of your trips and you begin to understand and get a little more subtlety in how you respond to the world and then all at once the whole world collapses on you again and nothing seems to work and you're back into that. So it goes back and forth,

[46:45]

it alternates. Now I feel free, but if you're already in basic pain, like kind of existential angst, anxiety about your life, you don't know, but not if you just got a phone call from your best friend that he or she's got cancer and you've got to go see them. You try to get on the airplane, but the airplane, there's a storm somewhere and the airplane can't get to the place where you want to get to in time, you see. And not only that, but when you get off the airplane and you go to the bathroom or something, you mislaid your ticket. In other words, things begin to pile up. You've noticed that tendency? Pain starts and it begins to build a whole story, a whole drama around it. So you become out of sorts and out of temper and it seems to get worse and worse. Dogs bark at you, taxis won't stop, birds drop stuff on your head.

[47:46]

I mean, it's like the whole world is just shitting on you. That's called the pain of pains. It's in our daily life all the time. Practice just makes us, it's not that pain is, pain is something that is, practice makes us more sensitive to our pain and other people's pain. And so when people practice these various disciplines and practices, at first their life just seems to get worse. We go haywire, almost haywire, because nothing seems to be working out. And here I've been sitting and doing all this stuff and all at once my life seems to be more satisfied than it ever was. And that's largely, I think, one of the conditions for that is because you become more sensitized to more subtle ways you're dealing with the world and the world is reflecting the way that that is happening. When we were talking earlier,

[48:48]

you were talking about the bonding that we all do with each other. So maybe it's very much like, oh, love can just get through and I promise I'll remember you forever. Or, I'll sit every morning. Let me just walk again. And I think all of us have probably experienced that in some sense. I think part of the practice is just trying to keep that at the forefront of our minds that we perhaps don't have to get to that stage of the bonding. They say we don't have to, we do get to that stage at some point. But it's just like, you're grateful. Yeah. If you can do that, that's great if you can do that. Be grateful for it. If you can do it. But if you have to force yourself to do it and say, I'm grateful, and you're grinding your teeth, are you really grateful? It's okay to be more positive rather than, ah, it's a bummer and I'm bummed out and it's a bummer,

[49:54]

but gratitude will change it. Definitely. And that's part of the way we have to be with each other is to, you know, be grateful even though we don't feel that gratitude. It's called act as if. It's a big part of practice is act as if. You don't believe you're already enlightened, but why don't you try to act as if that's already the case. Question? Well, it's a great thing that I've always, I've always just, I've always had to suffer from depression at various times, but this time it's always been very hard for me. Partly because I was raised Catholic and I didn't understand the hypocrisy of helping each other this time of year. The rest of the time we're walking the meadow. But this year

[50:54]

I've actually not had this problem. One of the things that happened a few weeks ago, I was sitting with Andrew and we were talking and somehow I forgot to talk about a story and he was just really tired of it. Because this is a problem when you get tired of that story, you're growing to a point where you're going to get bored with it. When you get bored with it, then you can really let it go. And that made a lot of sense to me. It really helped me get through the college season and just let it all wash off maybe. And the little things that didn't help me. But the question is, I still have a hard time sitting right now. I have a really hard time with the mind and the body. You know, you get busier and busier

[51:54]

and if you don't consistently have to sit after a while it gets harder. It's always something I guess is similar to the kind of physical thing that you have to really get through when you get to that stage. But you can't. Well, you know, it's useful to understand that this path doesn't mean that you're going to be able to sit every day. You know, you're not an automaton. And it's alright to sit and find times when you just can't do it. That's part of the path in fact. That's like light and dark again, you see. I can't sit right now, no. And if you do sit and you say your mind is wandering, well, in a sense this practice is not about concentration. This practice, there are concentration practices as you know, but this practice as you also know, I'm sure, is just letting things be the way they are. And the way they are is I can't concentrate.

[52:55]

I can barely sit here. I'm making myself available to the process. I sit down, but shinkantaza means just sitting, just allowing yourself to sit. And whatever comes up is extra. You see? I can't concentrate on this and that. Oh, that's just stuff. And finally some days you can't sit at all. I don't even want to look at the zafu. The zafu, seeing the zafu depresses me. It reminds me of all the stuff that used to be good and now I can't feel it anymore. I pull out a book that used to inspire me, the words seem meaningless on a piece of paper. That on again, off again rhythm of our life is the Buddha Dharma. It is in itself the way things are, you know, that is the rhythm of our life. Now I see it, now I don't. Now I have it, now I don't have it. Now I can, now I can't. The big problem in all that is that we fall on one side and duality of the other. When I can't, I want to can. I like to paint, you know, I like to paint pictures. But sometimes I can't do it.

[53:58]

I get very annoyed at myself. Of course I can watch it, but I can see I'm annoyed because I want to be able when I sit down for something to happen. A lot of times nothing happens, just a lot of stuff comes up or I can't even move the brush. So that, that whole thing is a practice. And you see, that's interesting, this is like everything else. You start out with a lot of enthusiasm, you get into it and pretty soon you hit a certain level and now it gets tough, you know. Well, you want the goodie bag. I want, when I, beginner's mind, when I first sat down and everything was easier. When you first pick up a brush and you have beginner's luck or something. But, as you, all of us know, it doesn't work like that. You know. So, the main thing then is to be good to yourself. That's fine. Be just the way you are in this practice. Right now it's practice, see. But, you need me to tell you that and I need you to tell me that. See. When I'm in that space. We have to remind each other that, that's part of the practice. When there's indulgence, you know. I mean, how do you deal with the fact that

[54:59]

in our society or in many of us there's an indulgence? Well, just indulge. But, indulgence brings suffering. If you're, you know, if you're going to indulge, indulge. But then, totally indulge. Just indulge. Don't be half-ass about your indulgence. If you're going to finally indulge and say, you know, I need a good cry. Just have your good cry, right. And just do it, completely. Exhaust it. Get it all out. That's not indulging. That's really using the energy. What's with indulging is you're using it as a hedge to keep away from the suffering. When suffering becomes a game plan or a way of life, then you're indulging in it. You mean if I went out to get a bottle of wine and indulged in the whole bottle of wine so I could give myself a reason to have a cry? Yeah, just go and do that. But you may also end up puking your guts out over the bathroom sink because you haven't drunk for a long time and suddenly it just makes you sick as hell and now you're really P.O.'ed.

[56:00]

Now that doesn't work. And on top of that you're going to have a terrible hangover and so on. You're not going to repeat that one. You're going to find another way to do it but you won't do that one, you see. We've got to trust our own experience. It's okay to go and do that. Nobody else can tell you, you know. And my question is a complete never-get-exposed one for someone who devoted their life to it. What's the purpose of time? No purpose. Teachers say no purpose. They have no purpose. Purposelessness. If you have a purpose in life you ought to get something. But you're already something enough as you are. You don't need another purpose in your life. You're already living your life. All you're doing by sitting down is sitting for the sake of

[57:01]

just doing one thing completely. Just sit down. And it's very hard for us not to do something. And so we turn sitting into doing something, you see. We turn it into a big deal but it's not a big deal. All you're doing is sitting on a cushion looking at a wall. You're just a human being looking at a wall. But we establish an enormously sophisticated philosophy around that whole business, that whole ceremony, that whole affair. But that's our mind doing that. You see, you're watching how we, you know, we turn it into something. It's nothing. It's nothing to get a hold of. You just sit. There is value in just being able to sit alone because usually we look for any way out of our pain. But finally when you're hurt enough nothing works for you. You just sit down, right? You finally just go... You go... You look at the wall or something for a moment. You just take a breath. You don't know where to go next. You don't know what to do. Nothing works. But yet you're breathing.

[58:01]

The sun is still shining. Everything is going on. Something's working, right? So sitting is just a kind of... In a way it's phony. In a way it's a kind of a strategy, you see, like everything. But we have to have... As human beings we need a strategy. We need a technique to see what we really do in our life. So sitting is just a way of investigating our tendencies. And it's not to be something different from what you are. It's to be completely what you are. Rather than... You want to be a good girl or you want to be this or that or a freakish frat. No. So we see we're angels. We see we're devils. We see we're capable of glorious things and absolutely unspeakable things. You know? Each of us. And we need experience and we need other people to do that together so that we can share this experience and pass it on. And human beings have been suffering all this stuff for thousands of years and they pass on a lot of experience to us. So this helps.

[59:01]

Sit like this for a while. Just sit there. Take a breath and feel things. See? Feel them. This is yoga. You're actually embodying. You're not just laying back reading a book. You're actually embodying something, you see? And you're embodying yourself and everything that's arising that is making you feel the way you do with the conditions that are you, actually. So you give some space to that. Just allowing some space to happen. That's all it is. That's a lot. But as soon as we turn that into dogma, as soon as we turn that into should or should nots and musts and must nots and all the rules and regulations around it, then we get trapped again. We either inflate it or we dismiss it. We're back into duality. So part of a practice is to find out that that's what we'll do with it. We'll inflate it or we'll dismiss it. And we go back and forth. No, I love it. No, I hate it. No, I want it. No, I don't want it. No, I know what it is. No, I don't know what it is. But if you just do something

[60:02]

every day, without trying to have any purpose. One of the teachers said, Zazen is useless, but until you really have done Zazen, you don't know how useless it really is, you see? It really is useless until you know how useless it is. Spiritual practice is not useful in our nor egoic way. Spiritual practice is an unveiling of all the things, the crud that we put on in our lives in order not to feel what we really are. I feel like that also grabs the air that we're talking about today, going inwards and searching out the visions, but we use it as a practice. Can you talk a little bit about sharing?

[61:03]

Well, that's what Sangha is. You see, there's Buddha, right? There's the illumination that is our natural condition. Then there's Dharma. There's a path, as we said, that's been generated, but we do that with other people. So, there are different lineages and different ways to approach this problem. In early Buddhism, of course, the model and subcontinent there was for individuals, men and women, to become forced monks. They still do that. In other words, to go into isolation, to go into a kind of an ascetic retreat mode where you don't have any socialization at all, where you live on a minimal amount of sustenance and so on. As if you can get to a minimalism. You can get to a place where you see how little you need to exist in the world and get free of all the entanglements that come up through our sense desires. That's one model. That's one way of doing it. But in the growth of this practice, it was realized

[62:04]

by many people who've had satori and realization that self and other is a co-arising event of which you can't separate one from the other, that the liberation that comes from that is not actually enlightened or liberated until it is shared with other people. It's only, it's called camping out on the mountain. And until you kind of come down off the mountain of enlightenment and come back to the marketplace, they say, with gift-bestowing hands. In other words, you don't have any attachments particularly now, but you're just there for everybody else, for things to be exactly the way they are. So these two poles between being, you know, socializing with people and being with people in practice and being very ascetic is something that is actually built into our nervous system. It's something we go through with ourselves in practice. And when we work with a group of people around this, say you go into the mountains for three months like Tassajara, you're all together. You can't hide

[63:05]

from each other. But what's taken care of differently there is that there's an order to it. You see, in monastic practice there's a schedule. You get up and do this. All your needs are taken care of, but you've got to get up at 3.30 in the morning, you've got to go there and sit, and when the bell rings you do this, and everything is laid out for you. Tremendous resistance comes up around that. Tremendous. I'm an individual, I want to, you know, you give up all that aspect of it to work with other people and by working with other people and going to doing all the things you're resisting and don't want to do, you can believe that you're going to show yourself. You're going to stand there naked in front of everybody with all of your, you know. Yes, but you get fired if you were out. But in the world you get fired, you see, right. So what I'm trying to answer this in a roundabout way is that monastic practice, working with other people, going through all your shit together with those other people, having a schedule, having a tradition, it's very helpful. But it's not necessarily an end in itself. The end in itself is to see how we actually are in this situation, you know,

[64:05]

to learn a kind of Tai Chi, to dance with life. So that when you're back in the world, come back to a place where things are less rigidly scheduled and so on, then there's more freedom for movement. Then you can, there's a time you can, you're more sensitive so you know when it's appropriate to come forward, you know when it's appropriate to step out. There's more sense of appropriateness in your actions, you're not quite so clumsy. You don't feel so uptight because you don't know what to do. You're not so worried about what and what not to do because you're much more alive to what's arising now and watching yourself react to those tendencies, you see, to those circumstances by your tendencies. So there's tension and there's tremendous tension. Living in a monastery is hell-realm, you know, and a lot of it is a real hell-realm. And time is quite wonderful, you know, but it can really be hellish. And, you know, we're all codependent

[65:13]

in the sense that we all stamp and validate each other's papers about saying you're okay, you know, when actually I don't think you're okay at all. So how do we find a place where I can tell you this bothers me or, you know, how do we, this tension, this push and pull, this status game we're playing of being one up or one down, it's constantly going on. We have to learn how to play that, actually, we have to learn how to do that. Just our reactive tendencies as we've grown up, you know, learn a few rules which are important, don't do this, don't push people around, don't steal, don't lie, and so on. Then we just try to kind of get by, you know, slide through it by protecting ourselves and not getting too involved, but practice finally says you've got to just open up and show all your stuff, be all that stuff. So, of course, it involves therapy, you know, in a sense. Having a teacher, somebody who can kind of guide you who's been through it, not because they're better people, but simply because they've gone through the same things you have

[66:13]

and know just where you are. So you go to your teacher and you think you're finally free of your suffering and your teacher sees that you're hanging on to some aspect of the teaching of your psychological condition, and they'll demolish you around it. You come in feeling free and the teacher will say, well, why did you open the door? Do you realize that the way you come through the door is like a bull in a china shop. You're feeling really good and the teacher just begins to take you apart. Pulls the rug from under you. You begin to feel this contraction, you know, and you're trying to find out, what's happening? What am I defending? What is this about, this reactive? What is this? And the teacher says, well, you know, there's a lot of Zen stories like that. Somebody who's been a forest monk for 30 years, you know, the wind blows through him and they're one with everything and he comes down to see the master finally, right? The master says, which way did you point your shoes

[67:13]

outside the door? Can't answer him. He said, you've been 30 years up in the mountains but it hasn't done you a bit of good. You're not aware of it very much at all. So, the guy gets angry. Well, it has nothing to do with the way I point my shoes, you know. Listen, I can talk to the wind. I don't even need food. I am responsive to the divas and so on and so forth. Well, no, you're just hung up on a spiritual trip. You're just getting high on the Dharma. I'm here to deflate that bloom, bring it back to earth, you see. So, life does that to us. The dialogue between yourself and the teacher is always the dialogue between the way you kind of see yourself and the way the teacher is going to open you up from that particular one-sided view. Constantly pushing. Life will constantly push us and the more we open to it, the more it will push. You don't have to worry about having a teacher. Life will teach you. All you have to do is be open to it and be frank with it

[68:13]

and that's hard. Suzuki Roshi said, Zen is hard not because we sit in Zazen and our knees hurt us and there are a lot of rules to follow. Zen is hard because it's hard to keep our practice pure. Pure means that we don't, you know, inflate ourselves or diminish ourselves. Pure means that we don't, we don't mess with it. We don't make a big deal out of something. We just sit on our cushion. The simplest thing a human being could do but we mess with it. We all want to be, you know, teachers and we want to get spiritually light and be free and happy and a light onto the world and other people will look up to us and all this but most of the time we don't feel like that at all. Most of the time we feel like, you know, we're pretty dark and heavy and confused

[69:14]

and that's where we have to do the work, not when we're feeling up and free. It's when they take the knife to you, you know. No more anesthetic, no more pardons, no more paroles. It's just you and me here, baby, doing this. How are we going to meet it? That's all our life is from moment to moment and we miserably fail. As long as we have some criterion about how we've got to be, we're going to fail. Give it up. At the same time, have a practice to meet it. You have to do both, actually. You have to have a practice to see that no practice works in some final, ultimate way that's going to save you. We're going to die, you know. We're going to suffer a lot of pain, a lot of pleasure and so on, but we're all going to go. Everybody said,

[70:15]

said Katagiri Roshi at a fundraising dinner, everybody in this room is going to die after people got left in the fundraising dinner. It's not a thing that you want to first talk about when you get some donors and you don't want them to come. They're all going to die. But he's trying to bring you to the reality that all these things that we're doing is not going to hide the fact that the girl is going to get you. Anyway, what time do we... How long does this go on? It can be whenever... Well, I don't know. I mean, I... I'm ready to come to these events. White bean kale. They said the white bean spinach because we didn't have kale. I noticed. It's 12.15 now, so we could... 12.15? So public lunch is at 12.40. Okay. So all of you, thank you very much. And...

[71:17]

Thank you. We'll meet again, I think, probably. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes.

[71:25]

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