This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I was just thinking, I wonder how long it'll be before we stop thinking of the rain as a blessing and start to think of it as a nuisance. Oh, it's raining again. I don't know how it is for you, but each day that it rained. Yes! Yes! Earth is thirsty. Today, here at City Center, we're having a one-day sitting. A number of us, a large number of us, are sitting zazen and eating our meals formally and trying to behave ourselves in a quiet, silent, and dignified manner.

[01:00]

all in the service of experiencing the experience that's being experienced. Experiencing the experience that's being experienced. Which is a wonderful mystery in the human condition. Logically we can say, If it's being experienced, the whole thing's done. You're experiencing the experience that's being experienced, just as it is, whether you like it or not, whether you have a judgment about it or not. And yet, when you take it on as a practice, you discover how ephemeral, elusive, challenging, It is to do just that. Experience the experience that's being experienced.

[02:07]

So easy to lose attention. So easy to lose the conscious connection. So easy to move into associated thoughts. It's so easy to conjure up judgment. One of the disciplines of zazen, one of the disciplines of mindfulness, awareness, is to not have a predetermined agenda. It has to be like this, and then set about creating it. And in the workings of our being, our dedication, our resolve is linked to, usually linked to a purposeful determination.

[03:19]

We're dedicated to the desired outcome, the appropriate outcome. And to experience the experience that's being experienced, we need to set that aside. And if you have one of those wicked minds, you could say, well, isn't setting it aside also? Yes. This is why it's so deliciously tricky. And then what is the disposition? What is the attitude, the engagement that enables this? And so that's what I'm going to try to talk about. Although, essentially, the word essentially, deliberately chosen, in essence, it's an experiential process.

[04:27]

It's not... the product of our thinking. It's the product, it's the engagement of experience. So in addition to this today being a one-day sitting, it's also the first sitting in an extended 10-week period of practice. In the first talk, which I gave on Wednesday, I tried to talk about the vow, the intention of practice. For this period, 10 weeks, how will you formulate that in a way that it sustains your involvement? And this is also a tricky thing for us. In some ways, our intention,

[05:29]

is shaped by what we want and what we don't want. And the challenge for us is to become as thoughtful as possible, as insightful and possible as we explore intention. The poet David White says, all true vows are secret vows. The ones we make out loud are the ones we break. I think what he's getting at is our mind can conjure up all sorts of ideas and opinions and judgments and conclusions. and admonitions. And each of them has their own qualification, their limitation based on how we think of ourselves, the world, what I should do, what should happen.

[06:53]

And yet in the middle of that, something in us is capable of dropping down and touching something essential. And I would say, in some ways, we begin with whatever kind of intention, vow, resolve we have. And the very process of engaging it cultivates this deepening. In some ways, the very process of having an agenda, continuing to practice, and starting to see your own agenda, and then, oh, so I'm trying to make this happen.

[07:57]

I have conceived a notion of a good me, and now I'm getting busy in creating it. Hmm. And then in David White's poem, he goes on and he says, There is only one life you can call your own, and a thousand others you can call by any name you like. that essential being that goes beyond what our mind and emotions conjure up. And in the Zen school, the catalyst the prime mover is this experiencing the experience that's being experienced.

[09:07]

This is always available. It doesn't require something, some capacity of us that isn't already there. We don't need to know something that we don't know. We don't need a skill that we don't have. You don't need to be something that we're not already. The very process of zazen is to let that register and to let how we engage be guided by that. And then if we want to get fancy, to let how we engage be an expression of that. And then as we do that, literally to immerse in that. And I'd like to read two poems that I think are an expression of that immersion.

[10:18]

And also very different. The first one is by Seamus Heaney. It's called, Had I Not Been Awake. Had I not been awake, I would have missed it. The wind that rose and whirled on the roof until the roof pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore. It got me up, the whole of me a patter, alive and ticking like an electric fence. Had I not been awake, I would have missed it. It came and went so unexpectedly and almost it seemed dangerously, returning like an animal to the house. A courier blast from there and then lapsed memory, but not ever after and not just now. That sense of immediacy, that sense of an experience is experienced and the stories

[11:26]

and the implications and the judgments and the sense of me owning it, being it, drop away. We're sort of startled into awareness. And I think many of us think, yes, that's pure Zen. That's how it should be. And the other one's by Billy Collins. And it's called The Best Cigarette. I must confess, I've never smoked, other than a few puffs that when I was a teenager I thought was revolting, fortunately for me. There are many that I miss.

[12:28]

having sent my last cigarette out a car window sparking along the road one night years ago. How bittersweet these punctuations of flame and gesture. But the best were on those mornings when I knew I would have a little something going on in the typewriter. The sun bright in the windows, maybe some berlioz in the background. I would go into the kitchen for coffee, and on the way back to the page, curled in its roller, I would light one up and feel its dry rush with the dark taste of coffee. Then I would be my own locomotive, trailing behind me as I returned to work little puffs of smoke, indicators of progress, signs of industry and thought, the signal that told the 19th century it was moving forward.

[13:33]

That was the best cigarette. When I would steam into the study full of vaporous hope and stand there, the big headlamp of my face pointed at all the words in parallel lines. that other sense of presence. Maybe we could say that Heaney is pointing at that spark of being that's almost formless, that the experience just has vital energy. It doesn't have particularity. It doesn't have context. It doesn't have consequence. It doesn't engage. the stuff of our humanness.

[14:35]

And then Billy Collins says, but I am human. I do have an engagement in the stuff of my life. It stirs me. It challenges me. It delights me. That way in which experiencing the experience has a quality of permission. Let it be what it already is. And as that spark sets fire to the responses of your conditioned existence, So be it. Can there be something more like a grateful appreciation?

[15:50]

Part of Colin's genius, to my mind, is the insightful playfulness I don't hear in that any assertion that says, and this is the true way. And anybody who doesn't live according to this way is missing the true way. No. In what we might call a flaw of character, smoke. takes it and without judgment just says, hmm, there's good parts to it. I've long since tossed my last one out the window, but still I remember with fondness, with appreciation, with gratitude the delightful absurdity of my own being.

[17:08]

How do we allow for that likeness? Is it possible to bring the resolve of the true vow, the dedication, the presence, the patient returning to now? Is it possible to have that and to let it float rather than have the ponderous weight of a heavy stone? Can the way your consciousness, your mind, your conditioning get sparked, can that Can that be just as light as heenies, leaves, sycamore leaves pattering on the roof?

[18:28]

Just thoughts, images. Just another experience to be experienced. And even if your mind draws conclusion, can that just be experienced? So both of these. Going beyond the self, illuminating the self. And they balance each other. if we hold up only going beyond the self, somehow the self is the problem. Who we are needs to be eradicated, suppressed, fixed, purified.

[19:38]

Choose your image. On the other hand, if we only appreciate the self, we're inclined to lead into a kind of indulging the self. Oh, well, that reminds me of another story, another cigarette I had. Experiencing the experience is replaced by the enchantment of story. The world according to self becomes awakened with awareness. And the momentary experience sparks that awareness, illuminates the conditioned nature.

[20:43]

If we take Colin's poem from the perspective of practice, we can say, oh, look at all these details he noticed. As he went to the kitchen, he was aware of the agenda, the anticipation that was arising. As he tasted the cigarette and the coffee, He was aware of the taste. He was aware of the thoughts that arose in mind, the images. He was aware of his own sense of purpose. But I would say part of his great teaching is he invites them to float. He has a playful appreciation.

[21:55]

So to hold both of these aspects of awareness, the non-self and the appreciation of self, or more likely the appreciation of the particulars of self, And in a way both of these set the stage for purposeful engagement. Because the nature of mind is that its default mode is to move into its habituated patterns. And the nature of habituated patterns without awareness is that they create a kind of enchantment. We go into a dream. creates its own world and it responds to its own creation and it draws conclusions about both.

[23:06]

And the leaves can patter on the roof all they like because we're not awake to hear them. And the cigarette just becomes another deeply ingrained habit that even as it's smoked, it's not really smoked. There is no experiencing the experience. So technique. So in Zen, the primary technique is body and breath. And in some ways we could say awareness of body and breath are the initiation. It's a constant returning to that initiation.

[24:14]

One of the marvelous discoveries of modern science in the physics of perception and awareness is that we're discovering that the experience is experienced in the body and in the breath before it's cognized, before the mind has set to work in creating the appropriate thought, cognition. concept in relationship to it, already the body has exhibited Vedana, that immediate responding. And this is what makes it such a wonderful ally, because it will constantly open up

[25:26]

this stream of thinking attending to the body. It will constantly draw us back to the phenomena that are the essence of experience the experience. The mind can say, yes, I will. but that still needs to be translated into a lived activity. And it's the activity of experiencing that initiates a learning that's quite literally transformative. And this transformative quality of experiencing is not something we figure it out.

[26:34]

But almost every one of us will set about figuring it out, drawing conclusions, having ideas about it, what's the best way to do it, and whatever else. But can we hold all that lightly? not cast it in the light of being a great evil. The mind thinks. That's what it does. It draws conclusions. And so there's a balance in the purposefulness, in the nature of our effort. It is both dedicated and directed and committed And it's both accepting of whatever happens. And so this too.

[27:41]

A willingness to experience and an acceptance of whatever happens. And then in the Zen school, in the heritage of the Zen school, experiencing the body is expressed by attention to posture. Just the same way that the experience is embodied before it's thought about it, that embodiment has its own persistence. And so the body as well as the mind are predisposed to be a certain way.

[28:45]

And so the posture is essentially to try to embody availability for experience. So as you think about taking your posture, it's an interesting way to relate to it. Being available for experience. What is it for the body to be available for its subtle and not so subtle responses to what happens? Thursday I had oral surgery, which wasn't so terrible, but it was interesting as I could feel and hear my upper left, back of my upper left jaw being cut and grind.

[29:58]

And I find myself noticing my body tightening, and then in the noticing, inviting, releasing. Releasing, and then some more of the same, some more tightening, some more releasing. And this is Zazen. And maybe in Zazen we don't have such easily identified... Or maybe we do. But this... notion of inviting, releasing.

[31:06]

It's not about taking control, either making the experience that you want, or taking control and making the body, the breath, and the mind respond the way they should. It's actually something naive in thinking that we can do that. And in this quality of practice, there's two elements. And one is that sustaining our dedication is not dependent upon creating what we think we ought to be creating. It's not about the success of that. We sit upright in the midst of

[32:06]

the human condition. And that will unfold the way it unfolds. So there's something fierce about that, but there's also something profoundly liberating. We can accept that life unfolds the way it unfolds. It makes us happy. It makes us sad. It delights us. It dismays us. It empowers us. It defeats us. All these ways that we're capable of responding. And can we sustain a practice that just keeps being body and being breath in the midst of that?

[33:11]

Can we sustain a practice that keeps returning to what's happening now? And this... of us, when we engage it as an awakening process, it's actually enlivening. It's not simply laborious. It's not that we are trying to do the impossible. When we're continually returning to, well, look at this. Well, feel this. Well, notice this. When we attend to how whatever it is ripples through the body.

[34:14]

When the dentist was grinding away, I noticed my impulse was to tighten in my abdomen. And by the way, he was a lovely guy. I felt grateful for his skills and presence. And inviting loosening in the abdomen. And so, in this process, of responding to what is, and meeting and experiencing the response, we discover the particulars of the human condition, and we discover something about not being stuck in it.

[35:21]

And this is not dependent upon creating a special state of being. It's the process. It's how we engage it. and let it teach us. And when we can let this sink in, even cognitively, it starts to create a very intriguing proposition. So even that kind of contraction can become that contraction of body. that contraction of emotions, that contraction around some sense of life, some sense of self. And it can be noticed, experienced, and allowed to be just what it is.

[36:28]

So this is the request of Zazen. And so a number of us, 85, huddled in the Zen law. It's funny, after all these years of doing this, there's still something about that that I think is kind of amazing. A little bit absurd, but also wonderful. It sparks for me something of David White's. There's one life you can call your own and a thousand others that you can call by any name you like. the stories we tell ourselves, and get wrapped up in them.

[37:38]

You have all sorts of emotions, and how dare they, and aha, if only. And then to be able to just bear witness, to explore the body, that can be available, to explore the breath that can be available, to explore the disposition of mind. Each mind has its own genius. But when it's layered over with habituation, the whole thing is consciousness is dulled.

[38:38]

It loses its perceptiveness. It loses its ability to adapt and respond creatively. Sometimes I think it's like we start to bore ourselves. Kansas then, have the quality of improv. Because part of the challenge in having a technique in how you sit, I would say, it's a wonderful benefit. It's a practical way to relate to habituation. But the challenge of it is not to let it become some kind of wooden mechanical thing you're doing and you're actually not so wholehearted about it because it's boring.

[39:46]

But can your technique, your deliberate effort, can it keep exploring and being present for what's conjured up? Because as much as we have a genius for awareness, we have a genius for storytelling. The mind is constantly expanding its latest drama on the journey of being alive. I'll end with Billy Collins again. So, on a practical note, one thing we're experimenting with this practice period, this dedicated 10 weeks, is having an online version. And you're welcome to join that experiment. Basically what it means is that the talks, the Wednesday and the Saturday...

[40:57]

and the class related to it will be available online. And then we'll also create other ways to interact online so that those of you who, you know, it isn't practical to come here on a consistent basis can participate. And I think you can check out there if you'd like to explore that option. And I would also say, even though Zen conjures up its own environment for practice, that each of us can practice in whatever environment we're in, whatever context. And that can be its own creativity.

[41:59]

Okay. We can ask ourselves, well, for 10 weeks, is there a way I could enhance the possibility, the availability of awareness? Is it doing something extra or is it doing less? Often it's a combination. doing something different, like maybe being mindful more in some way, and being less busy. I remember once someone telling me that on Saturday mornings he would clean and do his laundry, but during that time he wouldn't make phone calls, he wouldn't look at the internet, he wouldn't even play the radio. He was just... two hours of dedicated household chores.

[43:03]

There's all sorts of ingenious ways we can take our life and give it, let it be a context of practice, an opportunity. I would invite you and encourage you to just think of that too. Okay. The best cigarette. If this poem wasn't so wonderful, I think I might feel a little guilty about reading a poem about cigarettes. But the blessing of Billy Collins is... He turns everything into a virtue. There are many that I miss, having sent my last cigarette out the car window, sparking along the road one night years ago.

[44:15]

How bittersweet these punctuations of flame and gesture. But the best were on those mornings when I would have a little something going in the typewriter. The sun brightened the windows, maybe some bullios in the on in the background. I'd go into the kitchen for coffee and on the way back to the page, curled over its roller, I would light one up and feel its dry rush mixed with the dark taste of coffee. Then I would be my own locomotive, trailing behind me as I returned to work, little puffs of smoke, indicators of progress, signs of industry and thought, the signal that told the 19th century that it was moving forward. That was the best cigarette.

[45:21]

When I would steam into the study, full of vaporous hope, and stand there, the big headlamp of my face pointing down at all the words in parallel lines. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[46:01]

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