Good morning. I vow not to misuse sexuality. Let the three wheels of self, object, and action be pure. With nothing to desire, one goes along together with the Buddhas. So I don't know if this is the precept you've all been waiting for or not. But, you know, I think sex is, well, just saying the word kind of says a lot, the word sex. I feel like given how many of tokusans and practice discussions over the years I've had about people's interest in one another, you know, it is the primary concern of many of you, you know, You're being sexually attracted to one another.

[01:03]

And it is one of the primary topics it has been, as long as I can remember. So I want to say, encouragingly, that I think the Bodhisattva precepts are actually a really excellent way to respond to some of the concerns that you have about how to appropriately express your sexuality. You know, the precepts can give us a parameter both for talking about it but also for engaging in a wholesome sexual way. We recite the precepts at weddings and baby blessings and even on the occasion of people getting divorced. So they're basically like a large containment vessel to hold all the ways that we try to understand and be in relationship to one another. And the precepts are all about self and others. How to do that? So I don't think it's a surprise to find that sexual desire is at the core, not only of the Buddhist tradition, but of all the traditions that humans have created in order to try to control the primary energies of human life, those being warfare, sexuality, and spirituality.

[02:25]

So tomorrow I'm going to be talking about this urge we have to kill one another, and today this urge we have to make love to one another. There are two sides of one coin. And spirituality, the topic of the last talk, is somehow, you know, the effort we make to try and bring these two sides into harmony. The non-dual reality of aversion and attraction. How do we work with those energies? I keep referring back to the 60s. But anyway, back in the 60s, our motto was make love, not war. And our gosh show was peace symbol. We really walk around the streets doing that to each other. I'm like, hey, let's be younger. We know who we are.

[03:32]

So our behavior, although, was quite incandescent, but it wasn't all that wise. Our generation set the bar very high for multiple partners, for great music, and for extreme states of intoxication. At the same time, we set the bar very high for sexually transmitted diseases, for drug overdose, for alcoholism, and for the failure, in many cases, to move from adolescence to adulthood. So I think my generation had many lessons to pass on to the next generation, both in a good way and in ways of Great caution. Watch out for that. Watch out for these, you know, extremes. We thought our intentions were good, you know, for the most part. And somehow things kind of went south.

[04:37]

And we're along the way there. Very painful and violent. You know, that coin flipped. So, sex is one of... the most, if not the most, powerful experiences any of us ever have. Apparently, during orgasm, your entire brain lights up, and you have that experience of unity with the universe that the mystics all rave about. Only ours is rather short-lived, unlike theirs, which can go on for quite a long time. You know, a sexual experience at most, very most, maybe an hour, and that is not healthy. That is... It's quite painful. And if you're over 40, it's dangerous. So... And actually, there's this really amazing... I'm sorry. You know, it's really funny, but I thought, I'm going to try not to be funny when I talk about sex, but it's really hard not to... It's just... You know?

[05:48]

Drink some water. Okay, sobriety. That was yesterday, wasn't it? Yeah. There is actually this most amazing, horrific story in the Pali Vinaya, apocryphal, presumed apocryphal, in which the Buddha conjures up this handsome male escort for a woman who has this insatiable sexual drive. And this male escort starts making love to her, and it goes on and on and on for days. And she's finally done with that. She wants to stop, but he won't stop. And I'm not going to tell you the rest because it gets really worried, including that he dies. And sometime way later, the Buddha comes back, and the conjuration disappears. The woman learns her lesson and becomes a nun. That's the morality of that story. And I thought, wow, the Calvinists don't have it over us at all.

[06:50]

This is really, really a scary story. So I think there's a tremendous bias or impulse in the Buddhist tradition to find sexuality as a kind of forbidden territory to talk about, to do, and so on and so forth. We're all kind of under the radar here. trying to figure this out. So I'm hoping we can get some guidance somehow. Wikipedia says that the sensation for both men and women is extremely pleasurable and often is experienced through the entire body, causing a mental state often described as transcendental. So, you know, the good news is that sex makes us feel good. Right? I have to tell you that. It's a really pleasant experience. And so then what's the problem? What's the problem? Well, one of the problems is, and it goes back really far to the history of religions, both East and West, is that it was strongly believed that having sex, particularly for men, well, maybe only for men, deprived them of this kind of energy they needed in order to escape the bonds of human existence.

[08:09]

That what was trapping them was this attraction through their senses, and particularly of sexual attraction. So if you could break that bond, you could enter into a sublime quiescence, which is vastly superior to anything that passion would ever result for you. So that's kind of the story, both in Christian and Buddhist and other mystical traditions. You've got to get on that sensual trap. So for Buddhists, foregoing sex was a requirement on the pathway to nirvana. But also, not only sex, control of all the senses was considered to be detrimental to the pathway to nirvana, as sex along with food, sleep, and any kind of intoxicants. There are even prohibitions against smelling incense. Too low. Women's sexuality was not a topic of concern among the world's great religions up until very recent times, and for primarily the reason that women were not significant in an androcentric culture.

[09:20]

Let me know this. I'm not trying to insult anybody. But, you know, it was male-dominated view of the world. So as a result, women were only significant as a problem in that they tormented men. They were objects of attraction, so therefore they were a problem. They were causing the problem. You're causing me to feel so terrible. So I think by living together, we have discovered that the torment goes both ways. As I said, that's what you talk about most of the time, and you're all tormenting each other by being attractive. So stop that. Our role model is the Buddha who left his wife and his child and overcame desire and ignorance and as a result broke the chain of the cycle of birth and death. That's our story.

[10:20]

I've been telling you that in class. The wheel, that's the wheel. He broke the wheel. Broke desire. So like I said, all of these sensory attractions are considered part of what pulls you away. from freedom, from liberation. And interestingly, one of the events that drove him away from the palace that's recorded in the Pali Canon is that he woke up in his harem. He had more than one wife, he had hundreds of them. And they were, all of the women were sleeping when he woke up. And they were all in these unattractive poses, like snoring and their legs were hanging over the couch and that kind of thing. And he found that horrifying. He's like, they aren't so pretty when they're looking like that. So, it's recorded that he then realized that a hedonistic lifestyle was not going to get him to freedom. Hedonism means pleasure, based on pleasure.

[11:24]

So, at the same time, sexuality wasn't the primary target. The primary target in the formation of the early Sangha, was the result of sexuality. Babies. You know, babies bound men as if by a red thread to family. And family, you know, to lineage, to genealogy, ancestors, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, children, grandchildren. This is the red thread. And it's for this reason that the Buddhist message of celibacy drew very sharp criticism from Indian society at the time. This is again from the Pali Khan. At that time, sons of well-known and distinguished families from the country of Magadha were practicing the religious life under the guidance of the Blessed One. This upset and angered people.

[12:25]

He is on a path which takes away people's children, the monk Gautama. He is on a path which makes widows, the monk Gautama. He is on a path which destroys families, the monk Gautama. And yet the Buddha, even so, continued to insist that sexual thought and action was, you know, absolutely imperative to be restrained in order to break this cycle of human existence. So the bonds of attachment, which are hard to break, are to children, wives, and parents. So because of the need to regulate sexual activity, many of the rules that were laid down were specifically laid down against contact with women, the object of attraction, presumably the object of attraction, right? So the male sangha became isolated from the rest of society. It was cut off into its own community and ironically created an alternative family of its own.

[13:29]

So the word abbot, English word Abba means father, and Abba's mother, and you all are the children. That's the model. We're the Buddha family. We use that language, we use familial language to describe our community. At the same time, so this again about sexuality, sex was not itself of much concern within the segregated sanghas. So sex between men was not particularly an issue. And there weren't many regulations prohibiting that, nor sex between women. Those weren't issues. It really was making me, it was the big issue. And homosexuality was not viewed in East Asia the way it became to be viewed in Europe and the West by virtue of the Catholic, certain Catholic thinkers. really had a very strong and, you know, held down view of sex, of homosexuality in particular.

[14:37]

So, the great advantage of homosexuality is that it didn't produce offspring. It didn't create this kind of red thread attachment that threatened the Cenobitic community, the monastic community. So this home leaving, family leaving tradition was well established in India over the centuries as it was in China and also in Japan up until quite recently when something very unusual happened in that the ordained priests were allowed to marry. And this is only within the last hundred years. But this is a real break with the proscription against married life, family life. So the establishment of the Buddhist Sangha initially had this four-part Sangha. There were the monks and the nuns who left home and lived in communities together, all the separate monks and men.

[15:39]

And then there were the lay men and lay women who stayed home and worked and supported their families and also supported the monks and nuns. So that still is the way the system works in many Buddhist cultures right now. So even though this was a primary rule, celibacy was a primary rule in the Buddhist Sangha, and it's the only rule, in fact, in the Vinaya, which you cannot argue about. You're forbidden to argue about the rule against celibacy. No, the rule for celibacy. You can't argue about that. They really locked it down. And at the same time, It's an amazing amount of information on the role sexuality continued to play in the Buddhist Sangha over many, many centuries. Of course, it didn't go away. But there's a tension that was established between the actual physical body of the monks and nuns and the rules of how they were to behave.

[16:49]

So there's this book, The Red Thread, Bernard Forer, who's a professor at Stanford University, did a lot of research on this extreme effort that monks have made through the centuries either to live by the monastic regulations or to get around them. And a lot of the material that he's collected, you know, would have been very shocking to me 45 years ago if I'd read it because it's, you know, really graphic and it has to do with this sin of Sodom. from the Bible, sodomy. And that was still against the law, even in California when I was a young woman. It was against the law. You could go to prison. Or worse, you know, beaten for sure. It was the sin that was not to be spoken. And I remember this quote that maybe you've all heard from Queen Victoria about lesbians, that young ladies don't do such things, she said. So...

[17:54]

Even so, sexuality receives a lot more attention in Buddhist societies than do the other of the three poisons. You know, attraction. So this greed, both aversion and confusion are not given much concern. I don't think we have a single guideline against delusion. It's a good thing. So... Even though I'm not going to share with you a lot of the scholarship of Bernard Foer's book, which is really quite fascinating. You know, much of what was written in the polycanon as what you cannot do was written in lower detail, almost like the manual of what you never even thought you could do in an old book. You know? Did you think of this one? You know? I'm not kidding you. Frogs? So, no frogs. So, they list by name all the animals that you must not have sex with.

[19:00]

I never thought of that. So, as Four points out, the people who write such laws rarely seem to have a sense of humor, but the people reading them can find a great deal of amusement, as I think you would, you know, by looking at them, and as at the monks over the centuries. It's quite, you know, it's quite comical. But there is a part of this story that I think I do want you to know. I want you to know in the sense that I want Zen students to know. I want to know. I think it's important that we know about the ways that these laws have been institutionally violated, the rules, mostly by people with greater power. You know, this abuse of power, really, when it comes to it, which is true of the military as well. You know, the officers abuse the younger men. And they can do it because they have power. And then they can lie about it. And the same thing has happened in the religious cultures of the world, as we know.

[20:06]

I mean, I think Spotlight got the Academy Award this year for revealing the lies and the silence around the abuse of children that was going on among the Catholics, which is perhaps even more shocking than the actual thing. No, the actual things are pretty shocking. But the fact that the whole community, you know, shut its doors against letting this be seen and known and stopped was really disturbing. So I don't think we should do that. I don't think we should be ignorant of the tendencies, as Suzuki Roshi said, we should know our tendencies. And sex is one of those around which people tend to lie. So one of the things that was most common in East Asia was the senior monks to use young boys, novitiates, as surrogates for their sexual partners. They would dress them in special clothing and so on. They're actually records kept of this practice. There were some rules against putting jigger colored threads on the novitiates' ropes because that was attractive.

[21:11]

That sort of stuff. So... even though this kind of, you know, deception has persisted and this insistence on celibacy has persisted in both the Christian and Buddhist and other religious traditions for thousands of years, you know, with this dual reality going on, truth of the behavior and imposition of the rules, it still was considered to, you know, that foregoing sex was going to allow you to become liberated. There was an insistence about that in the tradition. you know, kind of over and above the behavior on the ground. This is what you have to do to become liberate. So it's very hard to kind of get that out of the way. Is that so? Is that true? I mean, you have to tell me. I don't have to tell me, but you have to know whether that's so for you or not. Is that what's blocking our way to liberation?

[22:13]

So this was partially because the Buddha grew up in the yogic tradition of India, where this was very much a part of the yogic understanding and practice. And it's through that tradition that he became liberated. He was a yogic. He did abstain from many things, including food. He nearly killed himself by abstaining from food, minimizing his exposure to drink and not living in a shelter and so on and so forth. So he was a true ascetic. And so were the Greek Stoics and the Christian mystics and the Indian yogis. And the way they conceived of the self was that it was like a citadel that was being besieged by the outside world. And in that picture of the wheel, there's the guest house, which represents the person, you know, with these windows. And what's attacking that, in some of the more traditional depictions, it's a fortress. And the fortress is being attacked through the senses by the outside world.

[23:17]

So you have a moat and a fence and a wall. You've got to keep the world out, keep it back. So because the external world was considered to be what was attacking you, then the association with desire and the world, the world became associated as evil. The world is evil. And it's trying to take away my purity, my effort for purity. In order to rip out the root of desire, spiritual seekers had to basically negate the phenomenal world. So once the world was perceived as impure, then salvation lie in a very long and painful process of purification, which ultimately seemed to not really work. didn't really work because it was always out of reach. And this is what the Buddha, too, said, this is not the way.

[24:20]

I'm not getting anywhere with all of these ascetic practices. Although, as he did, you can almost, you can die trying to do that. So Bernard says, Bernard Ford says in his book, by the same token, sexuality, initially a mere technical obstacle for ascetics, became identified with defilement. It was a form of vice. Early Buddhist deprecations of the body, in particular the female body, aim at provoking a horror of sensual desire. You know, such as the carnal ground meditations. You go and you watch the body. I mean, decayed in a particularly woman's body. It's like, oh, that's not very attractive. So that kind of kills off your desire. So because other objects of sensual longing, like food and drink and sleeping, and also thinking about food, drink, and sleeping, are also fundamental forms of desire.

[25:29]

In fact, they're more primary than sex. You know, we can all forego sex for a day or two or months or years or decades. I mean, it's not, you know, it's not impossible. In fact, it's likely at some point that sort of falls away. And yet it became the primary object of renunciation because the others could not be suppressed for very long. You can't go for days and months and decades without water, food, or sleep. So sex became the fall guy, you know. So ascetics viewed, and as I say, ascetics viewed all forms of pleasure as severely deficient. Here's a little poem. He who enjoys pleasures is never satiated. He who is deprived of them suffers greatly. When she does not possess them, she wants to possess them. When she possesses them, she's tormented. The joys of pleasure are rare. The grief and pain that it exudes are plenty.

[26:32]

Because of pleasure, men lose their lives like moths dashing into lamps. So, this restraint of sexuality for both the Buddhist and Christian traditions has been the subject of criticism for decades, centuries, you know. As long as it's been running, there's been critics who've said this is not a healthy institution. And yet, these traditions themselves, celibacy, is exalted as the pathway to perfection, to a state of plenitude incomparably superior to the illusory pleasures of the senses. Anyway, so the idea is that you will get bigger, better, greater, and longer-lasting bliss by foregoing sensual pleasure. At the same time, it wasn't the attractions of these exalted states that was the main motive for the average monk, for the usual monk.

[27:33]

The average monk who entered into monastic practices was more concerned with the 12-fold chain and the role that desire plays in perpetuating rebirth. It was really not, I want to get to this great place. It was, I want to get out of this painful place. The motive was more to get away from suffering. So, you know, rebirth brings about a new baby. And as happy as that makes everybody, a new baby already applies the death of that child or the death of that adult. So birth and death are suffering. So even though reproduction is essential for survival of the human species, the endless cycle of birth anticipating the individual's death is not desirable and therefore should be cut off. When the warrior Korimori longs for his wife, a monk says to him, The heretic demon king in the sixth heaven, Mara the evil one, who rules as he pleases over all six heavens in the world of desire, resents the efforts of the world's inhabitants to escape the cycle of birth and death, and thus he hinders them by assuming the guise of a wife or of a husband.

[28:49]

The Buddhas of the three worlds, who regard all mankind as their children, and who seek to lead us to the pure land from which there is no return, have issued strict injunctions against loving the wife and children who have chained us to the wheel of transmigration from remote antiquity to the present. So, at some point in the history of our tradition, as the Mahayana view of the Buddhist teaching, as interpretation of the Buddhist teaching, began to rise and become more of an understanding of an internalized relationship to right and wrong or prohibition. The rules were not about some particular little thing you did out there. Don't touch that, don't eat that, don't look at her, and so on, which was the other approach where you have like 250 things you don't do. In the Mahayana, it became like, you know, how's your state of mind right now as you take actions in the world?

[29:52]

Are you free of greed and hatred and confusion? So this is really a shift in the direction of precept language. So there was a much greater tolerance of the world and a much more positive regard for desire and for passion and much less ascetic. So by the teaching of non-duality, which is there in Buddha's first sermon, Mahayana... eventually revalorized the world, the beauty of the world. Once again, instead of being this evil place that was trying to take away your freedom, it became the very location for your freedom. Nirvana and samsara are not two. So because of these teachings, such as the perfection of wisdom, to fulfill the virtue of morality, was no longer, you know, relying on some kind of, you know, non-existent purification.

[30:58]

It was actually to see that purification as well as sin were empty of inherent existence. They were just dual, you know, partners of a dualistic system. Sin and purity. Two sides of one coin. Huikei the second ancestor said to his disciple, the three poisons are to be transmuted by meditation, not by restraining actions. Bodhisattva precepts are open to all, to eunuchs, to lascivious women, to demons and to beasts. Very nice grouping. So, it's getting better though. You see the trend here. Our feelings aren't hurt that much, are they? We've got no worries. That's okay. So as the Buddhist tradition continued to transform itself as it moved northward to China, Tibet, and Korea, transgressions of the precepts came to be understood as actions that lacked compassion.

[32:09]

So according to a sangha, one of the primary visionaries of the Yogacara school, the risk that compassion might lead to attachment or desire is relatively minimal compared to the fault that would consist of taking a dislike to others. So, you know, here in our community, right here at Zen Mountain Center, we have walked ourselves into a tradition that has a lot of baggage around sexuality. A lot of baggage. And I think we need to unpack those bags and see what is worth keeping and what it is we have to actually uphold and how. We have a really interesting job to do because we're the first community to practice together as one whole sangha. We have the child, we have the baby, we have men and women, we have men who like men, and men who like women, and women who like women.

[33:14]

Yeah, there are many. So all of that. Everyone is welcome in our Sangha. So as a result, we have to rethink what is the prescription around sexuality? What is the healthy way to live as sexual humans together? So one of the reasons we get to do this is because in Japan, and not for very nice reasons, the Meiji... dynasty permitted monks to marry, who's basically to try to break up the power of the celibate monastic institutions, because they're very powerful, as is the Catholic Church. You know, the Pope and all those guys, they're very strong. They've been very strong for thousands of years. So somehow, like a whole bunch of enemies together, you know, can generate a lot of energy and accumulate a lot of property. and so on.

[34:19]

So we have this interesting thing that happened, not to be nice to Buddhism, but to basically try to break it, in which the monks, fully ordained monks, could marry. And although many of them had wives anyway, because Japan, when Buddhism arrived, the people who became monks or priests... already married so they just kept on being married but they didn't say they were and they kept on having wives children and that was really pretty standard and it was one of those things you just knew lied and didn't talk about so the women weren't acknowledged as their wives but they were like housekeepers and that sort of thing as the catholic priests also have done for centuries so then they made the wives legal and in doing so they could stay in the temples, the children became legitimate, and so on. It was actually a very good turn for the family. We just recently decided at a meeting that the wives of our abbots could have their ashes with their husbands.

[35:21]

And this has never been done. So we're going to put Mrs. Suzuki's ashes with Suzuki Roshi, which makes me very happy. So Suzuki Roshi had a wife. and children. His son, Hoitsu, is the abbot of Rinsumin, his home temple. And his son, Shumbo, is going to be the abbot to come to be. And his little boy, Conroe, I think is his name, who was three when I met him, like, well, someday, if all goes well, they're already programming him. I heard his father, Hoitsu, said to him in English, Conroe loves a Heiji. I said, well, they have him lined up. So he will probably train at Aheji. Maybe his sister will get to train at Aheji. Japan is talking about this too. They've heard that maybe that's not the best way to be that exclusive. So anyway, for now, Aheji is an all-male monastic institution, and that's where the priests still train, and they train in this as-if traditional form, and then they go home to their temples with their wives and children.

[36:34]

So I really do have this question for us because we are inheritors of an androcentric training model. And the relationship we have to sexuality has changed in recent times. Thank God. You know, it's really getting so much more generous and kind, less hateful. And women are included as equal partners in our community. You know? Wow. This is... In our lifetimes, this is... very quickly. And initially, Suzuki Roshi had planned out separate practice periods for men and women. He wasn't thinking that we would practice together here at Tasahara. And the people, the sixties, said, we're not going to go if we have to be separated. So there was the samba responded, you know, no, we don't want to do that. That's not our way. So as a result, we have now made a big change in what happens for us. So I think it's really important that we discover a healthy relationship to our sexuality.

[37:44]

The idea that we could even leave it out is absurd. It's like leaving out your eyebrows or your elbows or your small intestines. Your sexuality is always part of you, every moment of every day. And it's part of how you express yourself and how you identify yourself. I guess the main thing I wanted to finish with is that, as I've said again and again, the precept I value most highly is honesty, not lying. Because I think if we're not lying, all things can come into that agreement, not to lie, and we can work it out. It's just not lie. Let's not lie to each other, not lie to our partners, not lie to our ex-partners, not lie to the teachers, and so on. If we're hiding and imagining there's something shameful that we're doing, Well, maybe you are. And maybe it would be good to really look at that because you don't like to feel shameful. You don't want to feel shameful. So, you know, if we share and open our behavior and we're not worried that there's something wrong with it, then I think we can actually have a very healthy life together.

[38:54]

So along with being honest, we also have, you know, loving kindness and we have sincerity of our practice. We have... a deep love for the Buddha and his teaching, and for this community in which all of us get to be together and try to figure this out. That's our amazing, most amazing thing of all. We get to work this out together. And we can think for ourselves. It's an amazing privilege in this terribly regulated world. So, I wonder if you have anything you'd like to say? Any questions? Yes? What are the consequences for not being honest in our community? Consequences? Well, unless we don't know about it, not much.

[39:58]

But if we find out people are not being honest, I think there's been some pretty serious consequences to that. You mean like punishment? Yeah. I don't think they punish people. Right, so how do people learn from their mistakes? Because if they don't understand that it's... I mean, if they don't feel any remorse or feel like they don't really wish to stop doing a behavior that is creating a dishonesty, then I feel like, well, then the question becomes, well, then do you really want to practice here? It's not like, okay, leave. I mean, somebody would have to break one of the major, you know, kill somebody... steal sangha treasure and that sort of thing, that we would expel them. We might not say, you don't get to live residentially anymore. We've done that many, many times. You're welcome to come for sashims and to come and practice here. But, you know, your behavior is not conducive with what we hope for residential life. So we've done that. So basically, the request is to come back in line with the shingi, with the rules of our life together.

[41:05]

And the person gets an opportunity to do that. And if they don't, I doubt that it would work very much to have them continue, I don't know, case by case, right? And I don't know who or what you're talking about. Well, maybe so. I'm not going there. I'm not. I'm just playing. So let's keep it general. You know, I just feel like... How are we supposed to know? You know, it's like, it's really between the two or three people involved in the particular story, you know? So how does the community at large know when somebody's not telling the truth? Maybe they don't. Maybe it is between the person and the practice leadership. And sometimes, I mean, it would be very odd work meeting announcement. We have a liar here. And that was done. And, you know, pilgrims did that. It pillared people. Shaped them. Read letters.

[42:07]

So I don't think we want to go that way. I don't think we want to make public shame part of our life. I think people, when things are known by the practice leadership, I promise you it's discussed among the practice leaders, and it's not inconsequential. And the person doesn't think it's inconsequential either. But not in my experience. And people get more chances. They don't just get, you know, like, okay, now you lied, you're... There are a number of hope for reconciliations of major players in our community that maybe before we all die will happen. And there were, you know, painful things. But if you think of something that you think would work, you can share that with us. Can you be a little more... I'm not sure I... So, if you have a discussion about... ...and how, you know, my honesty, how to be related to...

[43:43]

Yeah, well, that's why we talked about it. My understanding is if you want to say something that's, I've been using this term radical candor, and I shared that with all of you, if you want to, if you feel safe and trusting of someone enough that you would be honest with them, you know, in terms of, like in my role as a teacher, that I would be willing to be honest with the student. I would hope it would be in the context of trust and affection. Otherwise, I wouldn't do it. If I didn't feel affection for the student, I would just be quiet because I wouldn't trust myself. So if there's affection and there's an intention to be honest within this range of how much you know or don't know about the situation, and you want to say something that might be like, well, would you like to think about this? In a sense, it's kind of critical. That kind of conversation, for me, is private conversation.

[44:48]

I would not do that publicly. If I wanted to tell you or anybody else what a great job you're doing, I'd make that as a work meeting announcement. So you want to praise people publicly. And if you want to say something that's about deportment or change of behavior, that's done privately. And I think that's skillful means. that has some unhealthy ways of dealing with sexuality, and that we need to unpack that? I think I said baggage. Baggage. Sorry. I wasn't listening at that moment. I was just curious, so is that just theoretical that we would unpack it, or is there ways that we could do that as a community? Is it just we should unpack it, but...

[45:50]

individually with each other or not as a community. I'm so curious if that, how that would happen. How do you want to do it? You're part of the community, so am I. Everybody here can contribute any way they like to unpacking. And I hope will. I mean, that's true and not true. I mean, without certain structures and guidance and power, then sometimes those things never happen. So what? So that may not happen if someone, if you just say we should unpack the dysfunction around sexuality, but if there's nobody who's spearheading that, then it doesn't happen. So I just want to put that out there. We spent a full practice group. The thing is, the question's going to get the wrong time. question came during the talk at the beginning of the practice period.

[46:54]

It was all about sex? Yeah. Yeah, but the entire community wasn't there. But that's always true. Can't never be always there. They're recording. I mean, I assume his lectures were there. Well, there's one thing. Okay, so if we knew that Reb had spent an entire practice period recording conversations about sex, we could all listen to those. So there's one way we could let it be known that these conversations are happening. I think that's a good possibility. It could be in the, we don't have a window anymore. It could be in the Sonda News, you know, that if you're interested in this topic and would like to contribute or be part of a discussion, here's some things you could check out. I mean, it wouldn't be so hard, I think, to start a conversation. It's interesting, the line of the machine reviews that we have being a practitioner, everyone asks questions about, can I run, can I go to the backboard to stop, but when we talk about the three sentences about sexuality and not showing any interest, no one ever asks any questions.

[48:02]

It's just like, I think it's not so easy necessarily. Right, it's not. That's why I was a little hesitant to even, I was going to skip this preset. See if they notice. You wouldn't have brought it up. It's interesting. I think sometimes the elephant that's in the room, nobody wants to walk around it. Yeah. That's why we're wearing clothes. There's an elephant in the room. Go on. Summer's coming. Yes. Yeah, well, this is, you know, human long time. Adam and Eve, right? What did they do? They put on clothes. I mean, we really have a, you know, our entire civilized history is about our confusion about this particular issue. And so just to get to talk about it, I think it's really good and we should just keep talking about it. There's 60 plus people in this room.

[49:02]

Hopefully many of you will continue to be at Zen Center and we'll keep talking about things that you think need to be talked about. I really hope you will. And I'm going to try, you know, but... The elves are leaving Middle-earth. It won't be long for us moving out of here. So you guys are going to have to pick up the ball. Come on. Any minute now. Valerian, I wanted to ask you a question. I know, I know. But I remembered from yesterday that I wanted to tell you I was sorry because my Shiso told me that he thought I misunderstood your question and therefore my answer was probably opposite of what I would have said had I correctly understood.

[50:10]

So anyway, that's all I wanted to let you know. So, Valerian... I like the way our pre-sex is worded that not... What do you say? My other disciple? The misuse. The misuse is the problem. So I think if we are respecting each other, if we... I don't think sex is a problem if we have a good relationship. You know... we can always work things out to be a couple. But the problem is the disrespect, and that happens a lot with sex, that you see the other person as an object, and maybe more than one of animals or whatever. And that, I think, is the problem of sex.

[51:11]

I mean, that's definitely, for me and all the people that I have, who say they have a problem with sex is that they are so... that it's not even containable, that it's just like this urge to pronounce. And I think that's a problem. Well, that's why I think the important thing too is to have sexualities in the context of all the other precepts, as are they all. It's one set, it's one precept of respecting the other, promising not to misuse, meaning not to abuse sexuality, by taking advantage of you in any way, such as intoxicating you, lying to you, slandering you, praising myself. So if you're lining up with the precepts as a whole, if that's your intention, then it's just one of the ways that you take care of the other person. It's not just for your benefit that you get sex.

[52:14]

That's just taking. That's stealing. So it's a very delicate dance. And as everyone knows, we've all tried it, I guess. And it's very challenging for us to get it right and to be respectful and all of those other things. And, you know, there's no manual that really... It's not about technique. Nothing to do with that. It has to do with what you're saying about your heart and your feelings and your intellect. all of that has to line up. My therapist used to say that, you know, in order to have a partner, you have to have an intellectual, emotional, and sexual compatibility. If you only have one of those, it won't work. You have to have all three. So I think this, you know, what you're pointing to is, it's complicated. And it's, in many cases, it's just not appropriate. You know, as much as you'd like to, it's just not appropriate. And, you know, like,

[53:14]

Rev said one time, Buddha does not make love to children. So it also isn't appropriate if you have a lot more power over somebody else, as a teacher or a therapist or a physician. And that's why these laws, I don't know, laws don't necessarily help explain to people what the problem is. But the problem is the power dynamic. And also for these senior priests that had young boys, or for the Catholic priests who had young boys, you know, it's like, it's not the sex part, it's the abusive power. and the damage that happened to those kids as they report. As grown men, they are just like traumatized by what happened to them as children. So we gotta believe them, you know, and honor that that is not a good way to take care of kids. So it's the result of our actions that tell us whether they're wholesome or not. Is that a good thing to do? Uh-uh. So be careful. What keeps coming up for me is this kind of very subtle distinction between like thinging the world, making the world a thing, whether it's like a code of conduct, you have these specific rules and you have to control your behavior because of these rules, but it's not about transforming your own impulse or your own way of seeing or opening yourself to something deeper.

[54:50]

And in the same way, like through sexuality, sexuality often, I think, controls people. Like I've had the experience of being controlled by my own sexuality because the impulse is so strong. And the desire of sexuality is a cover in the world so that I don't have to deal with something in my life that's very strong, dark shadow or some difficulty that I've gone through. I have some trauma, so I seek out something wonderful to try to cover it up, but that's not relationship, right? That's not like seeing someone, honoring them, entering an equal ground to a depth. And I think that this distinction between like codification or like some thingness and like a lived experience of relationship is like a very difficult thing to navigate. especially around something so charged as sexuality.

[55:52]

For that reason, I think sometimes celibacy is a wonderful idea, but not because of some external imposition, but because of how it works to do that. Yeah, it's a great way to learn about your sexuality, being celibate. It's an amazing thing because you begin to realize it is all pervasive and it's all the time. that you feel that's part of what you are is that energy. The beauty of the world is part of that energy. A lot of attraction that's there. And I totally agree with you. It has to come from inside your own understanding. And by making those kinds of mistakes, you realize that is not good. That's not good for me to use people like that for my own needs. So then you don't do it, hopefully. Heather, although you've... Round two, is it okay?

[56:57]

No? It's okay? Come on. Thank you for the history that I'll send. And there's also the part of me that was looking at this lecture was going to be about how do we actually do this? You know, the acknowledgement that we are in this little valley together, in these little containers together that we agree to be in. love to hear from your seat. I mean, in a way, we don't want to be prescriptive, but there is that way of like, can you talk us through how it can happen successfully when we are uplifting at least that? And apparently you talked about it many different times without like gentle, you know, like scales touching each other, like softly, you know, whoa, contact. And then, okay, well, how do we acknowledge the emotional component Beyond just the sexuality, like the sexuality is the desire. And then how do we take care of each other at the emotional component? Because they're taken away. What's most painful in the relationships that happen and break up in this container is that feeling of like you don't care about what it's feeling.

[58:06]

I think we're, I think we tend to conflate our entire life experience, emotional, intellectually, and sexual on, on whatever's going on in the relationship. It's all of it, right? It's not just the sexual part. The sexual part has got a big role to play, but, you know, when you slam the door, when you say that mean thing or whatever, that may not be the energy that's driving. It may be an entirely different, like, I hate you right now. So we've got the whole ball of wax that we have to work through. And I've been breaking these down into ten, the ten precepts are... 10 parts of the big ball of wax about the relationship of self and other. So you have to put those together as the one ball of wax, which is you, meeting another ball of wax, which is somebody else. You know, and I must say that I think the most successful contact I've had this entire practice period has been with my shi so. When we learned how to pass the gamashio, it was so exquisitely wonderful.

[59:12]

That moment when he put out his hand, And I put the dish on his hand, and there was no feeling of, oh, it's going to drop, or has he got it, or nothing. It was like, oh, my God. This doesn't get better than that. So just do that with your partner all the time. Be really exquisitely sensitive to them and what's happening at that point of contact. Yeah, well, I mean, he's not really my partner. He is my... We have a long time, but I'm going to let him go very soon. There's a little ceremony coming up, and it's when he's off the leash. So... Gotta let go. Anyway, I think it's really about exquisite attention to detail. Memitsu no kafu.

[60:13]

Attention detail, just like tea ceremony, just like everything. Are you paying attention when you put the cup down for your partner? Did you just slam it on the table or did you set it down with a lot of affection? How are you treating that person as the most wonderful thing that could possibly be in your life or are you just all caught up in your own feelings? You didn't remember my birthday. You know, we all play it all ways, and we all know the consequence when we do. And if we're behaving one way, it doesn't go very well. If we behave the other way, it goes much better. So, I can't tell you how to do that. I'm sorry. You have to... You kind of said I should. I heard you. It's on the tape right here. Anyway, but good luck. I think you can do it, and you've been doing it. I know that. Oh, okay. All right.

[61:14]

Everybody got showed. I know, I know. But I think it's that time. Is there any burning question or comment anyone would like to make? I know this is a really important topic, and I would like you all to feel really invited to talk about it, not just now, but forever and ever. Someone's pointing at someone else again. Okay. I'll try to make it quick. That fortress analogy, like the self to fortress. In this, I was thinking, I also heard this precept as not using, not misusing sensuality, all of the senses, and works with this as well. Could you maybe come up with an image of like, not a fortress, but like how to relate outside of ourselves. Some image that it's not a fortress and not also this grass thing. I think. Well, looking at you is pretty good.

[62:25]

Okay, good. All right. Thank you all very much.

[62:31]

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