So I haven't given a lot of Dharma talks, and this was the first time David was Chico. So we got to be, I don't know, I would say terrified. I don't know if he would say that. We got to be scared together. And I found that was really helpful to share that moment. Or two, or three. Yeah, so I haven't given a lot of talks, and so because of that, I started preparing for this talk really early. I figured I had this mistaken idea that it's all about being prepared. And it is helpful to be prepared, but this is what happened. On Wednesday, a friend of mine sent me a...

[01:01]

an email, and it was big letters, watch this, and he had a little link in it. So I clicked on the link, and I watched what he asked me to watch, and it was pretty interesting. And then later, I came here to this Buddha hall, and to the Wednesday night talk, and Vicky was giving the talk, and about five minutes into the talk, I realized, she's talking about what I was going to talk about. So... I mean, she wasn't exactly talking about what I was going to talk about, but it was close enough, and she covered a lot of the territory. And so I thought, well, you know, I could still, you know, do my talk. But then I went back, and I looked at the... the little 18-minute video that my friend sent me, and that 18 minutes is a hint.

[02:02]

And it really, it inspired me, and it brought up a lot of questions. So Thursday morning, I switched my talk, and this is the talk that I switched to. And this is prepared, but not as prepared as I was earlier in the week. So the little link led me to a site called TED, T-E-D, and that stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. And TED basically is, I think it started in the mid-'80s, and it's a conference down in Monterey County. And all the, you know, initially it was about technology, entertainment, and design. I think the scope is much bigger now. But it's bringing all the thinkers and visionaries and great minds together to give these 18-minute presentations to inspire and inform and just so they can relate to each other.

[03:10]

And I think ultimately, there's Vicki. It's okay. Take it out into the world and affect the world and make the world a better place. So I like TED a lot. And it's too expensive for me to go to. I think it costs a couple thousand dollars to go. But they have a great website. And every now and again, when I have time, and I have 18 minutes, I sit down and watch one of their talks. And I love the fact that the talks are 18 minutes. I wish the talk was 18 minutes. And maybe it will be. Who knows? But... I don't know. I think I'm a Zen student. I must have something about form. But, you know, and I don't, there might be a reason for the 18 minutes. And if anyone knows, you can let me know or say something. But it's kind of intriguing that everyone just has this period of time to express themselves. So the talk that Jeffrey sent me was by Dr. Jill Volte-Taylor.

[04:14]

And I also know since I've noticed that a couple of people around Zen Center have gotten this talk. I think it's starting to catch on. And there's good reason for that. She is a neuroanatomist or brain scientist. And what she does is she studies the map of the brain and the kind of microcircuitry of the cells and how they talk to each other and what kind of chemicals they need to talk to each other and how much and where and when. So she has this really deep understanding of how the brain works. And she actually brought a real human brain out onto the stage and held it in her hands, which was both fascinating and kind of creepy at the same time. And what she was demonstrating was the fact that the brain has two very distinct, I mean, we all know this, but it was kind of amazing to see the right and the left half of the brain.

[05:20]

And then the spinal thing kind of hung down. I think that was the creepy part. But the halves of the brain were fascinating. And then she went on to describe, you know, again, she only had 18 minutes. So a very kind of... wide-brush overview of the functions of either side of the brain. And the right brain, she said, is all about this present moment. It's all about right here, right now. It's undifferentiated reality. And she said it learns through the body, kinesthetically through the body, has no language, just understands in pictures. She described it like information in the form of energy constantly flowing in through all of our senses. And then students of Buddhism will recognize this description. Our sense organs are open and information just streams through this big collage of information.

[06:28]

And that there's no sense of separation in the right brain. It doesn't exist. And the left brain thinks literally and methodically, and it's all about the past, and it's all about the future. And the function of the left brain is to take all that collage from the right brain and divide it, categorize it, organize it, define it. And it associates everything that we've learned in the past and projects into the future all of our possibilities. So it's very practical. It's calculating. This is where I am lives. This is where we become separate. And then there's this thing called the corpus callosum, which is 300 million fibers. And that's how the two sides do some communicating.

[07:33]

What was fascinating about her talk is that she had a stroke one day, and she didn't know she was having a stroke. She just woke up with a pain on the left side of her head, and she started to just go about her morning, and one moment she was on her exercise bike, and she looked down, and she had this experience of a consciousness that wasn't connected to herself, and she had this thought that, oh, what a weird creature that is. You know, she kind of saw her arms as claws, and it was an odd experience, but still, you know, she kept going through her mourning, and at one point she lost, she was still in her apartment, and she lost balance, and she fell against the wall, and she looked down, and she noticed that her arm in the wall, she couldn't tell the difference, and that all she saw was energy and molecules and atoms, And, you know, she's a scientist, so this is kind of interesting to her.

[08:35]

You know, she's intrigued by this. And eventually things happened. Her right arm went numb, and she realized she was having a stroke. And then her left brain stopped. And she had this experience of profound silence. All the chatter, all the identification with an individual self was gone. And she was in this I mean, the way she talked about it, and this happened 10, maybe 10 years ago, and she had tears in her voice when she talked about it, this kind of wide, expansive connection with everything and being a part of an energy flow. She called it nirvana. That was her, it was just, it sounded exquisite. It was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. And then her left brain would clunk back in, and she'd be, oh, my God, I'm having a stroke. So I recommend going to the TED site and listening to her talk.

[09:36]

It's very easy to find. If you have a computer, it's TED.com, and I think it's a new talk, so it should be right on the front. And I don't want to go into her whole description of how she rescued herself, but But what happened when I listened to that was I started to think about practice. And in particular, in the end, I wrote this down so I remember it, she said something. She said, who are we? A life force power of the universe with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds and the power to choose moment by moment who and how we want to be in the world. And while that statement resonated with me, and while I had some intuitive agreement about it, what I couldn't get behind in what she was implying was that the shift from the right and the left side of the brain was a simple thing.

[10:38]

She made it seem very simple. She actually stepped to the right, and she talked about the right, and then she stepped to the left, and she talked about the left, and I thought, oh, if only. But for me, this is where practice comes in. And I thought of zazen. And I thought of the two kind of, the two parts of zazen for me, the physical and the mental. So physically, in zazen, we take a posture of stillness, a kind of a yogic posture of stillness. It's not But it's an energetic posture. There's energy there. It's not the same as going to bed. It's not the same as slumping in front of the TV. We're still, but there's a presence. There's an energetic presence.

[11:40]

And then there's the mental part of zazen in that we're facing a wall. And to use Dr. Taylor's language, we're... because the input is much less than when we're walking through the world, when we're walking down the street, when we're going to our job, because that input is less, we're able to see our mind. And it takes a while, because when we sit down, at least this was my experience, when you sit down and you face that white wall, that left brain doesn't stop. You know, as a matter of fact, it almost seems to ramp up. But really, you know, what's happening in my experience is we're not as distracted and we can see it. We can see all of that, you know, categorizing and organizing. We can see the reaching into the future and pulling from the past.

[12:43]

So, and... and also present in zazen is the right brain. And my experience is that the left brain can settle down enough. Sometimes little bits of the right brain can kind of be experienced. Again, you know, I'm not so sure about... the separation that Dr. Taylor uses, but I found her separation helpful to at least think about this. But my experience as a person is that we're not, those things aren't that separate. And my experience as a Zen student is I'm not so interested in separating them. I'm not so interested in pure Nirvana experience. I don't know, maybe I'm silly. I mean, there are probably people in this room who would love that.

[13:51]

As a matter of fact, it reminded me of a question that pops up, I've seen pop up around Zen Center every couple of years, and that is, say Paul and Steve invented an enlightenment machine. Paul and Steve are our senior teachers, our abbots, and it's Say all it took was, you know, you go into the machine, they shut the door, Paul presses a button, he opens the door, you come out, you're enlightened. Would you do it? I mean, this is a really good question to ask if you're a practitioner. Would you do that? Maybe we can talk about that in question and answer. If you could find a little bit worth what that would be like when they were in. That's it. Well, let's see if I do. Let's see if I do my answer.

[14:52]

Yeah, that's a great question, actually. You know, I mean, and that's, to me, that's the next question, is, well, what is enlightenment? You know, what is it? And I think for a while there was a magazine that was floating around. I never read it, but it, you know, I thought it was kind of weird, but... It's an excellent, excellent question and I'm not going to answer it here. But I tend towards no. My answer tends to be towards no, I wouldn't. And here's why. The reason is the path of practice is not, for me, is not always easy. It can be very, very challenging, but the rewards there are so important.

[15:55]

Practice has taught me patience. So when I'm sitting down facing the wall and all I have is that left brain on overdrive and, you know, I'm anxious or I'm restless, or I'm frustrated, I have to work with that. And in working with that, I learn patience. And patience is a huge thing. It's an important thing. It's something this world desperately needs. And not patience as a concept, although the concept's okay, but patience as something experienced. Patience is something I have done with myself. And doing it with myself is not a big step for me to reach out and do it when I encounter my life. So I think patience is really, really important. And I don't know if the Enlightenment machine teaches patience. It might. But I don't think so. I don't know. The other thing that...

[17:00]

You know, walking the path of practice, working with that mind teaches me is kindness. And the practice period has been about kindness. And I've heard lots of wonderful explorations into what is kindness. And I think that's wonderful to think about it. And I think it's wonderful to consider it. But again, practice taught me it. I had to do kindness. I had to do it to myself because it's very easy when the left brain is ruling the moment to get quite upset with it, you know, and get impatient with it. The last thing we want to do in zazen is suppress. That's not the activity of zazen. So here you have this chatter mind. How do you work with it? Well, with patience and kindness over and over and over again. And I have to say it year after year after year, constantly.

[18:05]

And I suspect as long as I'm practicing, I will be working with patience and kindness. And I'm not so sure I want to give that up. I'm not so sure I want to throw that away for... something jazzy and wild called enlightenment. But who knows, maybe I'm very foolish. I'd be willing to entertain that. So we're training our minds in Zazen and there's a couple of ways to work with it. There's a lot of ways to work with our minds and there's a lot of methods in Buddhism But I mostly just know this method. There are Vipassana methods and there are Tibetan methods that involve visualization. But the method I know is working with the breath. And when I first started sitting, I was told to count my breaths from 1 to 10. And this was actually really helpful to me.

[19:09]

because I have a busy mind and it needs to do something, and the request of meditation is for it to quiet down. And giving it just a little tiny something to do, something that doesn't take a lot, but it takes something, you know, one to ten, was a good thing. And also, breath, connected with breath, which is always with me. It's not anything I have to invent. It's not anything I have to go out and get. Breath is one of my most intimate experiences. So to connect my mind with my breath and to give it a little one to ten, give it a little something, was really helpful. And I recommend that if you're just getting started out. And what I mean by just getting started out, that could be in your first five years of practice. It could be in your first 10 years of practice. It could be in your first, I don't know, couple months of practice.

[20:10]

But eventually, there's the instruction to stop counting and just be with the breath. And that I have found to be very helpful, too. That just, again, that connection with this very intimate event called breathing that's very connected to this very intimate event called my life. So this way we settle down a little, and maybe in that settling down, some of this wide, expansive, enormous, connected right brain can come in. And again, what I'm interested in is not how they function separately, but how they function together. How do they inform each other? And I That to me is wisdom. That, you know, having a deep and experiential understanding of not separate in the middle of your very, very separate life.

[21:19]

And coming from that place is the activity of wisdom. So that... when we're making choices in our lives, when we're making decisions, when we're trying to figure out how to be kind or how to receive kindness, which is equally important. I don't know if you talked about how to receive kindness in this practice period, but when we're engaged in that activity, knowing and recognizing what is kind is a wisdom act. It's not a formula. It can't be described, but it can be known. So another thing that the two brains reminded me of was form and emptiness.

[22:24]

You know, the right brain was very much to me about emptiness, this, again, undifferentiated way of being in the world. And the left brain was very much about form, you know, ideas and putting things into categories. And so Dr. Taylor gave a very, very beautiful... lesson on form is form and emptiness is emptiness. And I appreciated that because I got to really see, again, very clearly and distinctly the differences between the two. But in Zen practice, we talk about, we close the circle and we talk about form is emptiness and emptiness is form. And again, the relationship between those two and studying that and being in that and bringing the wisdom of your practice into your life day after day. So I really, really appreciate her for this.

[23:27]

And she's wonderful. She's very passionate. You know, she's kind of this nerdy scientist, but she's being passionate at the same time. And I so appreciated that. It might be an 18-minute talk. One other part about Dr. Taylor's talk is that she describes a moment where she's in the nirvonic state and it's beautiful and it's wonderful and she's looking down, she's in the ambulance by now, and she's looking down at her body kind of curled up. And she has what I call, you know, a bodhisattva vow moment, in that she chooses to not kind of remain in this state, but come back into her body. And the reason why she does this, she says quite openly, is that she wants to share this experience with people.

[24:27]

She has this, you know, she's a very unique situation. She's a brain scientist. She could watch the stroke happen. both from the inside and the outside. And she felt like she learned too much, and she wanted to bring it out and back to let people know about it, which I thought, oh, there's a bodhisattva at work. I thought that was kind of wonderful. Of course, she didn't use that word. I don't think she's a Buddhist, or if she is, she wasn't very obvious about it. Hmm. So I am going to, even though it's early, I was nervous about giving this talk, and one of the reasons why I was nervous about it is I thought, how can I talk for 45 minutes?

[25:31]

That sounds impossible. So I told myself, well, if it's not 45 minutes, that's okay. And so, well, So it's a little early, but I'm still going to start to wrap things up. And there's question and answer afterwards. So all these kinds of things that I've raised, I'd really be interested in talking with you about them. So come join me in the back of the dining room, and we can explore all this together. So I found this poem by Mary Oliver from The Leaf and the Cloud, and to me this poem speaks to that place where form and emptiness come together. It speaks to the experience of being totally connected with the world. also someone who separates and thinks about it and has a response to it and is passionate about it and categorizes it.

[26:32]

So I thought it was very fitting for this topic. So here it goes. Would it be better to sit in silence, to think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing? This is the way of the orange gourd. This is the habit of the rock and the river over which water pours all night and all day. But the nature of man is not the nature of silence. Words are the thunders of the mind. Words are the refinement of the flesh. Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments. We just manage it. Sweet and electric. Words flow from the brain and out the gate of the mouth. We make books of them. Out of hesitations and grammar, we are slow and choosy. This is the world. Every morning I wake, dressed in the dark, go downstairs.

[27:35]

I look out of every window. I go out and stand on the lawn. In the east, the slightest light begins flinging itself upward. And my heart beats, never in exception with excitement. My gratitude to you, dear heart. And that little passage is from Marvin. Though it will all vanish utterly and surely in a little while, I know what is wonderful. I know what to hoard in my heart more than the value of pearls and seeds. There was the day you first spoke my name. There was the white house on the edge of the harbor. There was the swan and the hummingbird. There was music and paper and the tireless pursued work. There were a thousand and again a thousand unforgettable days. And still I am looking at everything. In the wide morning and the strike of noon, I'm humming and clapping my hands and I can't stop, not for any reason, not even for the easiest thought.

[28:44]

And anyway, what is thought but elaborating and organizing? What is thought but doubting and crying out? In the dark, in the distance, I can just see the heron, dippling, then calming her long wings. So I thought, as I was reading that, that these would be good questions, actually, to bring out into your day today, into this beautiful, you know, exquisite, lovely, sexy, Saturday, spring day. What about asking yourself, what is wonderful? Do you know what to hoard in your heart more than the value of pearls and seeds? What is wonderful? Can you find that?

[29:47]

Can you stay with that? Can you share that? Can you know that? What can you hold in your heart that's most precious? Can you find that and know that? Can you share that? Can we help each other do that? So please go out, find that out and bring it back and let us know and tell us your story. Thank you. I'm trying to be good.

[30:27]

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