Good evening. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. How many of you are here for the first time tonight? Welcome, welcome, warm welcome. So. My name is Tim Wicks, and I'm a priest. I'm a Zen priest, and I'm Shuso here at City Center. Shuso means first monk or first seat. I share the abbot seat. I'm basically being trained, heavy duty trained. And... People ask me often what it is or why did I want to become a priest?

[02:21]

And, you know, I tried in the beginning. I was ordained, priest ordained, I guess, three years ago. And I tried to give them nice, succinct answers as to why it was... Because I would hear other priests say things like, I always wanted to be a priest since when I was a little kid. It was a calling. You know, these are the sort of typical reasons. And for me, it was none of those things. I just became a priest. Yeah. And in order for me to explain why it is that I became a priest, I would have to sort of go through each day over about the last 17 years, and then it would make sense.

[03:25]

But what I've learned in this, our practice, is to at least begin the process of letting go of those ideas about what it is that I should do and how it is that I should be in the world. And that's been difficult to do because I've always been an idea man. And I had a particular... preference for my fixed ideas, my really firm ideas that I believed in very, very deeply, that I was committed to. And we call these fixed ideas.

[04:27]

And our founder in Japan, Dogen Zenji, We had this to say about trying to have control of your life and to really make decisions about your life in the Genjo Koan, which we study a great deal. To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things. So in other words, to... as I understand that, to seek specific things, to carry myself forward, is delusion, he says. That myriad things, that life, phenomena, all things, come forth and experience themselves is awakening.

[05:31]

And that really makes sense to me in relationship to why it is that I became a priest and what in fact it is that I do now that I am a priest, which are a lot of strange things. My life is very different now. And it started getting different a long time before I was ordained, when I was considering it, thinking about it. My life started to change a great deal. And this idea of letting go of the idea of letting go of ideas became a very important practice to me because it was my fixed ideas, my commitments, which I thought were actually the value of my life, were actually causing me, many of them, a lot of suffering.

[06:35]

And so we try not to practice fixed ideas. And we say that everything changes. Linda Gallion spoke a little bit about this on Saturday in the Dharma talk that we had. She's our incoming president. And we say that everything changes in life. This is something that Suzuki Roshi summed up Buddhism in a couple of words. Everything changes. And so this, of course, is deeply connected to not having the discipline, the practice of not having fixed ideas. If everything changes, you can't really have fixed ideas. And this doesn't mean not having any ideas. This doesn't mean not being engaged in the world. It means specifically not being fixed. to your ideas, to having fluid and changeable relationship with the world, with all phenomena, with everything that happens in our lives and in the world.

[07:50]

We practice precepts, we practice the bodhisattva precepts, and those are guidelines for us as to how it is that we have fluid... fluid and changeable relationship with the world. So it's not just sort of a hedonistic, anarchistic wandering around. It's actually very much informed by the precepts which are at the center of the vows that we take when we first ordain lay ordination. So you see some people have blue rakasus on. And those are from lay ordination. And then those of us who are priests, we have these black robes on. And it's the same ceremony. You take the same vows. And then the brown robes are for people who have what's called dharma transmission, which I'm not going to talk about right now because I don't really know that much about it.

[09:01]

One of the future mysteries. When I first took Jukai, it was 2006, I believe, and I was sweating. I was very, very nervous. My teacher lived up the street, and I had Jukai in this room, and I was very nervous, and he could tell that I was nervous. He knew all about me. I have a history of violence. I already told him all about long since no longer practiced, but he could tell I was quite nervous. And he said to me, one of the precepts that you'll take today is to vow not to kill. And... in the kind of violence that I was involved in, basically really low-level street thug violence in London, England.

[10:07]

And I never killed anyone, but I tried in a very inefficient way. And I'm very grateful that that never happened. But Michael said to me, Michael Wenger was my first teacher, and he said, One of the precepts we take is not to kill, he said, but just by standing here, breathing, we're killing thousands of organisms every second. And that was very helpful to me because I was already beginning to see that taking the precepts, vowing to live by the precepts, I was going to fail. quite regularly and that in some ways Zen is the practice of sort of starting from zero and doing the very best you can, putting energy into doing the very best you can and being in a community of people who are also doing the very best they can as deeply flawed people.

[11:18]

And so that began to give me sort of a broader understanding of who it is that I was as a flawed individual going to publicly take these vows. So I had been a political activist for 20 years, very serious. After I stopped the thuggery, I became a Trotskyite and was very active in a Leninist organization and had very fixed ideas about what was wrong with the world and how it was going to be fixed and what my role it was in that fixing campaign. But that was sort of in the 70s into the mid-90s, and at the end of the 90s, I gave up pretty much all of my convictions except one, and that was my conviction to alcohol, which was a very deep and very fixed idea, which I had to give up eventually.

[12:39]

And by the time 2001 came around, when 9-11 happened, I was already beginning to practice Buddhism and was sober. And 9-11 happened on a Tuesday, and it was on Tuesday nights that I had my Buddhist meditation meeting, where I was pretty new. I'd been practicing for about a year. I was like, a lot of you are sort of coming here when I could. And the question came up, during this really very dramatic evening after 9-11. Is it possible to have compassion for the hijackers who hijacked the planes? And, you know, being an old political activist and having what I called at that time good politics, It wasn't a problem for me to understand the suffering that informed the hijackers to do what it was that they did.

[13:53]

The question for me and for other people in that room was, is it going to be possible to have compassion for George W. Bush? and the military industrial complex, which we knew was going to wreak havoc, as it has done, and kill many thousands of people. And that was a terrible question for me. Of course I couldn't have compassion for George W. Bush. He was a Republican, and he was George Bush. And that was just not going to happen, but... I was practicing Buddhism, so it was asking me the question, is that possible? Is it possible to do that? Knowing what it is that's going to happen, and indeed did happen. We invaded Afghanistan first and then Iraq. And something happened.

[14:55]

I was studying my own fear as a straight white male. and someone who's in recovery for addiction. And beginning to practice Buddhism, coming here on Monday nights, and I had a Vipassana practice. And so I was looking very deeply at my fear and learning about it and how deep it was and how far back it went. And I started to, as I was asking this question, is it possible to have Compassion for George W. Bush, I started to notice when I would see him on TV or a photograph of him in the paper, I started to notice that he also had that fear, that same fear that I have inside of me. He was a straight white male as well. And it's a very specific kind of fear when you go really deeply into it.

[16:00]

That's been my experience anyway. And so I'm not sure that I, you know, I didn't become a Republican, but I do think that I softened massively around George Bush. And this was such a paradoxical experience for me because, you know, the wars... we were engaged in was ramping up over the next few years, and yet I was softening, not only around George Bush, but around our military culture that we live in. And that was a very, very strange experience that I was disappointed with on an intellectual level. Very disappointed. But there was something opening up inside of me. I can still disagree profoundly with war and, in fact, deepen and broaden that disagreement with war and violence and killing.

[17:08]

But, well, anyway, it was just a very paradoxical experience to me. So to Nazis and to other Jews, I am a Jew. My mother was Jewish, and so therefore I'm a Jew. But I say it like that because I wasn't culturally raised as a Jew. I never had bar mitzvah. It just wasn't a part of my teaching at all. But in 2005, I was preparing to take Dukasa in the following year, and I had the chance to go to Auschwitz, Birkenau, which is in Poland. And it's an amazing place to go to.

[18:14]

If you haven't been, I strongly recommend it. the local Poles are not that excited about having this tourist destination in their midst. And you can tell they're actually still suffering a great deal. But it was late spring when I went there, and actually Auschwitz itself, which was the first death camp, is quite small. And... It was late spring, and the trees were in full bloom, and the birds were singing, and it was sort of a sunny, wonderful day. And the buildings there are these beautiful brick buildings. And then you go sort of up the street to Birkenau, which is the vast expansion.

[19:20]

of Auschwitz with the huge gas chambers that the Nazis tried to destroy as they were, in the last hours of the war, they tried to destroy them. But you can go down the steps and walk around Birkenau in these vast, huge fields where underneath, you know, are buried Thousands and thousands of Jews. My people, according to Jews and to Nazis. And it was a pilgrimage of sorts. And, you know, I'd already done this practice around George W. Bush and had sort of an opening, so... The question for me was there. Of course, I feel very connected to the suffering, the Jews and Romanians and gypsies, the Roma, and Czechs and gays and so many people who were massacred by the Nazis.

[20:41]

But was it possible for me to have some kind of compassionate opening towards the Germans at whose hands so many millions of people died. And that's still a question that I'm asking, but I guess that was 2004, so it's been 13 years. And... That also has been very paradoxical because you start one practice and it's not sort of isolated. It spreads out into the rest of the world. And so... You know, I can't... I can't say that I... I have total and complete compassion for the Nazis, but once again, it's been a very interesting and opening experience to ask the question.

[21:51]

One of the most fixed ideas I've had in my life, however, has been the one that is the inspiration for shame. Shame. And that is basically very common, is that I'm unlovable. Many, many, many of us have this. And for me personally, it comes from my childhood and not being nurtured. This is a very common experience that I get to share with many people. But once I started my practice, once I started this practice, it was... and myriad things came up to meet me, it was clear that I needed to do some kind of shame practice. Shame practice is a good practice to do. Basically, I just for the first couple of weeks noted how often I felt ashamed.

[23:02]

And it was amazing to see that almost all of my life I had some kind of shame. going on, sometimes very, very small, hardly detectable, and other times, you know, huge, sort of skin-burning shame, hair-raising shame. And part of the shame practice is to notice how it is that it is triggered, and around what. And not to necessarily try and change it, but just to simply notice it and be with it and see how it is that it arises and it passes away. It's very intense, one minute and less so the next. But the idea is to really deeply investigate shame and to follow it as far... into my experience as I possibly could. And then what happens, of course, is I begin to notice that other people actually have the same experience in life.

[24:09]

And you can start to kind of connect some things, like sort of, you know, white male fear and shame. The dots start to connect a little bit. And that makes the investigation that much deeper for me. So I guess it was around... So we make our robes. We have to sew them. We have to sew them ourselves. This is another thing that I learned, sewing. And going to the sewing room here, we have a sewing room here, and I learned that I'm an adult survivor of childhood sewing trauma. And there are many of us around. We're a silent group of lone sufferers, but we can come together now and begin to recover from our childhood sewing trauma here in the sewing practice at San Francisco Zen Center.

[25:14]

People with rakasus are laughing because they know what I'm talking about. It's a very beautiful that we have. We're so lucky to have this rich, deep, rich tradition that goes back to Japan. And we're pretty sure all the way back to the Buddha. So it's our opportunity to sow ourselves into this lineage of practitioners. And there's a special way that we do it, and so we have to have a teacher. And for many, many years, for 40 years here at San Francisco Zen Center, Blanche Hartman was one of the main sewing teachers, and she was my sewing teacher. She just passed away this year, and I had the chance to work very closely with her for almost 10 years. And I feel very, very lucky, because I'm now a sewing teacher.

[26:20]

which is a very strange thing for a former thug to be, but such is life when you allow myriad things to come up and meet you. But Blanchka detects in me, because she was an extremely intelligent woman, and she was the first abbess of Zen Center, Soto Zen traditionally has been very, almost completely male-dominated and so it was a great privilege and honor to work with the first abbess of San Francisco Zen Center and to do this thing that she loved so very much. But she started to notice that I had this common relationship with shame that she had seen in others and I come to find out she also had herself, which was very interesting. But she began to tell me the truth about sewing.

[27:28]

Here I was, someone sort of new-ish to practice, and had taken Jukai, but still feeling very new. And here's this great and dignified woman, the former abbess, you know, in her late 70s, early 80s, and she started to show me how sewing practice is a long series of mistakes, making mistakes. There are many fabulous sewers that you get to know because of this sewing practice, and some of them you know, or like educated in Europe sewers, you know, really serious sewers, and with beautiful stitches, little tiny stitches. And Blanche's stitch, in her words, was not an attractive stitch, but it was a strong stitch.

[28:31]

And so, of course, you know, I immediately compared my stitch to Blanche's stitch, and my stitch is very similar to Blanche's. It's not an attractive stitch at all. But it's a very strong stitch, and it will hold together the robe as it's supposed to do, for the most part. But Blanche started to show me how it is that not just sewing is a series of mistakes. Because if you look very closely at the stitches, and we take refuge in the stitches. It's a spiritual practice for us. Namuke butsu, we say, which is, I take refuge in the Buddha. I plunge into refuge with the Buddha without any reservation. without any holding back. But if you look very closely at them, each one is totally different from the previous one. And so you begin to see, wonder, what exactly is a mistake? So she began to teach me not just that sewing is a series of mistakes, but teaching sewing is a series of mistakes.

[29:37]

Because I was terrified to learn become a sewing teacher, which she asked me to do. Because it's a big deal. You know, people are transforming their lives and they're doing this huge thing. They're entering into the Buddhist way and to misdirect them is something that someone like me who has the relationship with shame that I have Very triggering. And just by working next to her and her slowly beginning to tell me that sewing and teaching sewing is about making mistakes and continuing. She said to me once, I was horrified, that she thought that she had made every mistake in teaching the sewing of Buddha's robe that could be made.

[30:39]

Which I now take as a challenge. But for her to tell me that was just a very deep gift. And I carry it with me. So, what do we have there? Eno? Okay. I would like to have some questions, actually. So I think that I'm going to... I'm going to actually end it right there. And let's see if I can get stumped by some questions again, like I was last time. Thank you very much for coming out tonight and listening to me very patiently. And... We've got about 10 minutes for some discussion.

[31:42]

Yes. Thank you.

[32:43]

Did everyone hear that? Yes. Okay. Yes. Oh, yes, of course. Okay. So what I heard was how do I manifest forgiveness in the moment for things that seem unforgivable, And what form does my inquiry take? How does that sound? Good. Well, we have this body right here, so this is where all the work starts for me. And I've tried to be a forgiving, compassionate person. And what I've learned in practicing with that and working with teachers here at City Center, is that it doesn't work for me to be compassionate.

[33:46]

What does help me a great deal is when I'm angry and judgmental, when I'm separating myself from other people, which I am, to focus on what that is like. What does that feel like? What does that feel like? Um... What does it feel like to be angry? And what did it feel like? How does that relate to how that was when I was violent? And is it possible for me to understand that kind of action? And that is an ongoing question and inquiry right there. Like I said, I don't know if I'm totally compassionate towards the Nazis. But I also don't know that I'm totally compassionate towards the things that we've done in this country to Native Americans, to Africans.

[35:08]

So I know what it's like to be angry in America, though. I know what it's like to be angry here and to really focus on that. And what happens is things grow out of it. And there's a depth that occurs. You know, we have our metta practice that we do, our metta practice. sutra that we chant and all of that is very important and to try to be compassionate and to try to be forgiving is important but I need something else rather than to be taught by teachings I need on top of that my own experience of what it's like to not be that way to really really look at that very closely and that's a rich place right there Does that answer your question? Yes.

[36:10]

Sure. Well, when I first started studying it, you know, I had a lot of therapy. My therapist said, you have low self-esteem. And so what's that internal experience? We call it shame. And so the first thing for me was to understand therapeutically some of the childhood mechanisms that started it. And actually I feel it in a very, it's a very physical burning experience. And there's different kinds of shame. But to recognize that in my body and to see how it is that it rises and it passes away mostly, but never completely. And so to understand it inside of me and understand the experience inside of me and to see how it's connected to almost everything it is that I do. I work in the building trades.

[37:32]

I'm just going to tell you this quick story because it's a good one, I think. I work in the building trades and I told one of the general contractors that I work with that, you know, I'm not going to be available for three months because I'm going to be going to a monastery. And he said, going to a monastery? He said, what's all that about? And I told him, you know, the quick story that I'd become a priest at San Francisco Zen Center. And After I told him all of this, he said to me, you must have done some really bad stuff. And, you know, I realized that there is some shame involved in my becoming a priest, but it's very treated now. And... The other part of your question is, how do I notice it in other people? Well, what it comes from, for me, is being neglected as a child.

[38:33]

And this is very dangerous for the human organism because we have these very complex, big brains, these huge brains that are capable of great things. And this long... spinal cord with all these nerves in it. And to leave a child untouched during its developmental years is very, very damaging. And that's what happened to me. Nobody touched me after I had that last diaper taken off. No one touched me for the rest of my developmental time. And And so that caused problems, to say the least. And one of them was shame. Actually, the core one was shame. And I come to find out that actually that experience is, unfortunately, it's actually more common than it is not.

[39:45]

And it's really, by seeing it in myself, that... that I see it in other people, and it's possible to work with. It is possible to work with. And this thing that separated me, because it's another form of isolation, shame is. It's a way of shutting myself up from the world. And it's another way, and I was very disappointed to hear this, it's another way of being self-centered. You know, like the really negative, opposite way of being self-centered for me. But this thing that originally separated me from people ends up being this thing that I've got this profound connection with what seems like a majority of people. And that's what we're doing here, just trying to break down those barriers right there and see how it is that we're connected. And that is a deep, deep connection that I share with many, many people.

[40:47]

That's it. The Eno says that's it. So thank you all very much for coming tonight.

[40:58]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.57