This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I remember when I was a Zen kid. I was a PhD student back in 2002, 2004. We used to visit San Francisco for American Geophysical Union. And between our science sessions, my husband and I would run to the city temple, Page Street, to get a glimpse of what was happening there and sometimes sit there. So it's beautiful to connect now. I want to start with... What in Rinzai school, Rinzai Zen school is called a koan.

[01:03]

Maybe some of you are familiar with it. Here's how the koan starts. Amok asked, how about the lay disciple, Shishi, who worked the foot pedals, foot pedals, but forgot he was moving his feet? Where has he gotten to? Master Rinzai Lingchi said, drowned in a deep spring. That's the con, drowned in the deep spring. For context, Shishi was a monk. In some translations, they say he was a Zen master. He was forcibly disrobed during a purge of Buddhism. when Lin Chi, Master Rinzai, was very young. Shishi was forcefully put in a servant quarters, and he made his living, or you should say he was a servant, thrashing and grinding rice by using his two feet.

[02:18]

I don't know about you, but if you've been to some of the Asian palaces, they have this... area where servants use their two feet to constantly grind grains and do other linear labor. So that's a con from Rinzai Roku, which is one of the fundamental texts that students in Rinzai lineage work on. Basically, there are thousands of cons, and it's one of the fundamental cons that we work with. If you are not used to cons, basically they are paradoxical statements or stories or dialogues between a teacher and a student, which the tradition asks us not to process intellectually.

[03:24]

not to process intellectually, but rather to, in some ways, repeat it like a mantra in our heads and find that fundamental paradox that the con or story is pointing to and present an answer in the interview room that shows you have understood the paradox and you have transcended the paradox. So maybe a few examples will make this clearer. One of the famous koans is, show me the sound of one hand clapping. So let's say one hand. How does one hand clap? There is another koan which says, show me your face before you were born. Do you see? Mother Mary, that's not a Buddhist con, but that's a con all of us live with.

[04:34]

Mother Mary is a con. She's a virgin. She was pregnant. She gave birth. So the Zen school that I have trained in and worked with, Rinzai School, works with, hundreds if not thousands of koans. And in this koan, there is a Buddhist practitioner who is going through tremendous difficulty, right? What you loved, what was your life, has been snatched from Shishi. He's been enslaved. He's deprived. He probably doesn't get enough to eat. Maybe his hands are bruised. Feet are bruised. But the statement is, he has forgotten that he has feet.

[05:45]

He has forgotten how his feet are moving. Where has he gotten to? Master Rinzai says, drowned in the deep spring. So the koan, if you ever work with a koan, your task as a student would be, my task when I worked in this koan was to meditate on this phrase that is the turning phrase in koans. The turning phrase here is deep spring, deep spring. What is this deep spring? Right? As you can imagine, this is not simply someone who has gone unconscious because they just worked so hard. Not that. Not that. Now there are these traditional koans, lineage koans, and regardless of whether or not we relate to them,

[06:50]

All of us human beings are facing many, many cons, right? Many cons. We call them life cons. These difficult questions that we can't seem to work with, right? As a society, we are living through the COVID con, right? One of the fundamental cons that you can imagine that I work with all the time as a climate scientist is the con of our climate emergency, climate crisis. I refuse to call it climate change because change feels, oh, change, change. Things change all the time, impermanence. And one of the biggest cons with climate crisis that I am living with these days is the deep call within me, deep call within me is how do I prepare myself, my beloved communities, and people who would hear my voice for the trauma that is about to come our way.

[08:18]

in a way that is trauma-informed. In a way that is trauma-informed. What do I mean by that? I am seeing on my screen that there are 134 of us today gathered right now. 134 of us. Every fifth person in this room, at the minimum, this is CDC data, has faced sexual abuse as a child. We don't think about these numbers. One in three have witnessed, as a little kid, domestic violence, which often means they have seen their mothers beaten. So yes, I don't want to make anyone feel like a statistic, but I know. There must be people in this gathering who face these things.

[09:24]

And then they are layered. There is alcoholism in the family. There have been suicides in the family, right? Regardless of our race and gender, there are things that we have all faced. We don't talk about the depth and scope of that trauma enough. Buddhist communities, insight meditation, Zen teachers who have done psychotherapy training, psychology training, are beginning to bring that insight about how much trauma we have to our meditation communities. It has begun to happen, but we haven't yet begun to understand how to deal with the trauma that is on its way. necessarily on its way, from my perspective, in a trauma-informed way. People say, we have solutions.

[10:29]

We just need good leaders, maybe. Or we have... Science is understood, right? Science is clear. We have the solutions. We just need to apply it. Why are we not... able to apply the solutions that we know exist. One of the fundamental reasons is that the depth and breadth of trauma that we have as individuals has taken away from us our ability to form relationships. Relationships. You know, one of the things that trauma does when It comes, comes is, it makes us, puts us into these three or four fundamental states of neurological, neurobiological states of mind, which is fight, flight, or freeze.

[11:34]

Okay? Does that make sense? Fight is... aggression that I am going to get into the fight mode. Flight is running away from the situation and freeze is becoming like a lizard hiding away, right? Not facing the situations. None of those three ways of being is conducive to forming relationships. And when we don't have relationships, when we don't have relationships, how will we come together to enact the solutions that are in front of our eyes? Some sense? You see, this column that we started talking about... Shishi is working so hard.

[12:39]

His robes have been taken away from him and he's been enslaved. He's working day and night as a slave grinding rice. One fundamental teaching that Buddhism, all schools of Buddhism give us, that we have access to what this koan is calling Deep Spring. No matter when and where we are, we settle down, we pay attention to our breath, the space between our two breaths. We allow ourselves, surrender ourselves to those spaces and deep spring can open up. That is an absolute point of view, right? There is an absolute reality that is always accessible, and that is like a deep, nourishing spring. What I am talking about here is how does that deep spring inform the times we are in today?

[13:49]

And if I focus on climate emergency, climate crisis, I feel that We need to address this fundamental con of trauma that we are surrounded with. Because unless we have ways to face the trauma we are already in, we will not have the energy, clarity, courage to face the trauma that, from my perspective, is on its way, even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today. Right? I have spoken about it elsewhere. It's not as if we have crossed the tipping point and all we have in front of us is doom and gloom. No, there are tens of tipping points. We have crossed only two and we need to do all we can to stop our planet from crossing others that have not yet been crossed.

[15:01]

The ones, the tipping points we have indeed crossed, they are going to cause a lot of suffering. I mean, COVID is causing enormous pain. I hope everyone attending today has not faced too much pain or death in their family because of this crisis. suffered from COVID for four months. My mother got sick. There's tremendous suffering going on right now. And my heart hurts, pains, when I think about how much more suffering is on its way because of climate crisis, climate emergency. And my heart also hurts, aches, when I think about how unprepared we are both for facing what will come our way even if we stopped all the emissions, and number two, how ill-prepared we are for stopping the damage we still can stop.

[16:19]

The place where I have landed in the last year and a half or so, working through this, both knowing what I know intellectually as a climate scientist and what I hear from teachers all over the world when they face difficult situations. I've come with this phrase called islands of sanity in a sea of chaos. We don't know how much chaos we will land into, but there will be chaos. We are already facing it. You know, San Francisco Zen Center community, Sahara community, California Bay Area knows the apocalyptic fires are here. You all, if you are in California, you've seen, you've lived through those fires. we're going to have more and more chaos no matter what we do.

[17:29]

What we can do is create islands of sanity in a sea of chaos. And what are the elements of these islands of sanity? One fundamental aspect of island of sanity, in my view, is our ability to come together as small communities, not necessarily in a group of 100 people, but in groups of 10, 15, 20, maybe 30. Small groups. And their ability to shed the masks that we go around with. We go around with these masks. I am okay. I am strong. I have my Zen practice helping me. Those are masks. Yes, Zen practice helps me and my heart hurts. We need people who can come together in their authentic vulnerability and share their grief and anger.

[18:37]

I have found myself liberated by being able to do grief work. We simply do not have grief. Enough psychotherapists in this country, let alone the world, where psychotherapy, one-on-one psychotherapy, can hold the kind of grief and trauma that already exists and is on its way. Yeah? So that's my point number one. And this ability to be vulnerable, to say what breaks my heart, makes communities like anything. Anything, especially when people in leadership roles become vulnerable, it opens up a wave of warmth in entire community. I know San Francisco Zen Center community has been doing a lot of work on racial healing, on white people unpacking white supremacy.

[19:47]

And all of those trainings, I've been very happy to see what I saw last few days as I was thinking about this talk. And I have found that in my experience, no matter how much we study, we come to a point where unless there is this basic thread of trust, all actions can be misinterpreted. these layers of privilege that exist and the privilege differential that exists in a community, among residents, among teachers and students, among teachers, the layers of privilege, there are many layers of privilege and to live with privilege warmth and to live with trust, nothing works better than vulnerability.

[20:53]

Nothing works better than me opening up, removing my mask and saying, folks, I'm really hurting. When I hear climate news, my climate scientist friends and I get panic attacks. See, and I need your help to prepare for this. I hope that makes some sense. So in my framework that I'm working with these days to create islands of sanity, to create these communities that will have resilience to face what is coming our way, number one thing we need is vulnerability among community members. Point number two. And vulnerability, one thing that's important to say about it, somehow I feel that we have lost it, at least in some Zen communities.

[22:01]

I haven't been in Zen center or lived there, but my experience sometimes with Zen tradition especially is that we have... Somehow I had this message early on in my training that a good Zen student doesn't cry. You work through it. You access Deep Spring. You get courage and clarity. And at least you don't go around being public about it. But being in the ability to release the grief and... put my tears in a public sphere has been utterly liberating, especially in the context of climate crisis and racial justice crisis that we have. Point number two is this little story that comes from Oakland, California.

[23:03]

I was working with a group of climate activists in Oakland, And I met a farmer called Sean. I knew Sean lived very simply. And he's like this pollinator activist who goes from place to place, sharing his skills. He's an excellent cook and grows food. I happened to ask him one day, Sean, how much money do you need in a year to... to do well, to be happy. And he's a happy kid in mid-20s, I would say. He told me $1,000. I had to ask him again, do you mean in a year? He said, yes. The story in itself has stayed like a con for me.

[24:07]

And I by no means want to romanticize poverty. I am sure there is a lot that people who make $1,000 or $2,000 have to struggle with that I can't imagine. The place where I am going with this is... An average person living in America, their carbon footprint is 30 tons, 30,000 kilograms, or you should say 62,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year. Everyone sitting here, if you are joining from United States, That's the average amount of emissions you personally are responsible for because of the way we live, the way we heat our buildings, the way our food is produced, and so on.

[25:20]

Everything together. Do you know how much this needs to be for us to have a planet with living human population by 2030? I don't know if the chat is open. We could ask people. I just want people to take a guess if you are not familiar with climate science. And I can't also see everyone, so I am not able to see if people know. I'll tell you the answer. Someone said half of that. No, that's not going to be enough. We need to have maybe half our emissions as well. planet. But what Americans need to do is weigh more because we produce way more than global average. Okay? I'll tell you, the answer is from 62,000 or 65,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year, we need to come down to 5,000 pounds every year.

[26:36]

And you know which country has 5,000 pound emission average per person today? That's like countries we call poor. That's most of India. That's Africa. What am I saying here? Coming back to the story of Sean. It is not just about renewable energy. It's not just about solar panels or windmills. We use so many resources, so many resources. The production of plastic, our computers, just about everything it adds to our footprint. To have sanity, to have climate sanity, We need systems that are different, of course.

[27:41]

But we also need to prepare ourselves spiritually, psychologically, for living a lifestyle that is very different from where we are today. And why did I tell us this Sean story? I am trying to learn from people like Sean how to live simply. Communities around the world, communities of people of color, indigenous people, poor people, they need to teach us, we need to learn from them how to live more simply and how to live in community so that All of us don't need our cars and our landmowers and anything we use around our house. That we have a community pool that we can share from.

[28:45]

That we have relationships that when I need something, my neighbor will give it to me. And I don't need to hoard everything in my house. We need the village life. So this whole work of undoing white supremacy or understanding whiteness, it's not just because people of color will, you know, in some ways people of color have had a kind of resilience that we in the Western privileged world don't have. I'm a person of color, but I don't have that kind of resilience that my mother or grandmother's generation had myself. We need lessons. We need lessons from cultures that have been minimized and subjugated to get through this time of climate emergency.

[29:47]

I hope it makes some sense. I want to end, go towards closing by sharing this story. And I'll make a few last points. The story I'm going to read you now comes from this man called Dr. Bayou Ekomolafe. The story will speak for itself and then we'll connect it back to what we've been talking about so far. He says, let me tell you a brief story. This is something from my own history. I grew up in Nigeria, but I traveled the world at a young age very quickly because my father was a diplomat. He lived and worked in what is now called Democratic Republic of Congo.

[30:55]

When I was a little boy, Congo was ruled by a dictator called Mobutu Seko. One of those heady days, there was news that the shoulders of that country were disgruntled and angry because the dictator Mobutu had not paid them their salaries. So the soldiers took it upon themselves to hunt down the foreigners who, in their opinion, were the causes of their misery. That meant me and my family. I remember the night they came into our home. They broke into our home. They hurt the people who were living with us. They took away property. They held the gun to my head. It reminded me of the fires we are having around the world right now. We've been through the fires before.

[32:00]

Anyway, On that day, they threw us out of the home we were living in with only the clothes on our backs. Miraculously, we lived. My sisters, my mother, my father. No one died. In the morning, the air was rent with cries of death and pain. It was like the sky was painted with blood. Siren cries in the sky. Warnings to avoid. This is important. Warnings to avoid the highway. We had no shoes, no clothes. We barely had memories of trauma we had just endured. But we decided somehow that there was something still worth living for. So we decided to make our way to the Nigerian embassy, which was miles away. How did we do it?

[33:02]

We went through cracks. We went through gutters. We stole through neighborhoods. We slept in the bush. We begged for bread on the road. And we got there safely and we survived. As this story goes on, I can send the link later on. Bayo explains this thing very beautifully, what he calls going through cracks. Going through cracks. Why am I highlighting this here? We have a new administration in this country coming in January 20th. In my view, we have avoided that descent into dictatorship.

[34:09]

Good, good. Our climate crisis challenge is still extremely steep, extremely steep, and we're going to face increasing chaos, as I have, in my view, tried to explain earlier. And we are going to reach times where the highway is not going to work for us. Once again, we will need lessons on how to go through the cracks and gutters and sideways because the highway is not working. And the courage and clarity and resilience to go through the cracks... I feel is going to come if we keep maintaining our relationship with deep spring. Deep spring. Okay? So it's the absolute deep spring and then the deep spring of community that knows how to be truly in relationship with each other, vulnerable, authentic.

[35:22]

Right? going through the cracks and deep spring. If you could remember two things from this talk, maybe the third one is village life, shared village life, where our footprints are way smaller than what they are today. And by the way, we cannot work on those footprints without By ourselves, we will need community to go. It's like descent into those choices together. I imitate my friends. Some people say we are average of 10 friends we have. We move together. That's why we meditate together in sanghas. My friends are meditating. I am inspired to meditate as well.

[36:23]

The basic psychology we have as human beings. So where do we land? In my view, my heart's calling is to do everything I can to prepare myself, communities around me, for... the depth of climate chaos we are going to face, and to do everything to be prepared for chaos at the same time, I'm repeating myself so the messages land, do everything to resist the system so that we can still stop the damage that can be stopped. There is narrative around which says all we need to do is to adapt There are forums around on the internet if you follow climate news, which says we've crossed the tipping point and all we can do is to adapt, to get used to the apocalyptic events.

[37:40]

Not true. We have to prepare for trauma. We have to be vulnerable. Be ready to grieve what has already happened and what is baked in. what is necessarily going to happen. But we also have a lot we can do to resist, to stop the bleeding, to stop what has already happened. And our resistance, in addition to the absolute deep spring that Buddhism is so good at, Buddhism has pointed the way towards that deep spring. Our practices, our liturgy, our They give us teaching to access that absolute nourishing, illuminating, luminous energy, whatever you want to call it. Buddha mind, big mind, you know, different traditions use different words.

[38:43]

Yes, that. But in addition to that... more vulnerable, more authentic community that learns from people of color, the cultures we have subjugated. It's time to go back and reconnect with them, stand in solidarity with them, not just because they need our help for healing, but because we need them to emerge from the climate crisis. I hope that made some sense. Thank you so much.

[39:45]

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