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. Good morning. This is quite amazing. It's since 2000. 18 or 19, that was the last time I sat here with people together. And all the other time it's been virtual and with little name tags, sometimes faces on the video. And now we're all sitting here, so it's very wonderful to be here. Welcome to everybody.

[01:02]

And is there anybody here who is the first time here? A very special welcome to all of you. Please feel free to make yourself as comfortable as you can in your seat. So there's no requirement to be motionless. just see what happens to you for the first time here. Today is a very special day for all of us because it's equinox. That means light and dark are equal for a short time in balance. In the yogic traditions, they call also, they say it's also an invitation for us because we are actually, our bodies are reflections to what happens in the whole universe, including the cosmos.

[02:19]

And there is an invitation of being balanced female-male because we all have both those energies in us. with some maybe more pronounced than the other, not necessarily tied to our biological gender. And I want to invite you to look around. Also, today is great because the air quality is actually better than it has been the last few days. So that's a blessing. And look around a little bit. Who is there with you in this space? And also, take a moment to feel sense inside you.

[03:25]

You can close your eyes if that helps. And just see if you can feel that actually you are alive. Can you feel the life flowing through your body, the energy of life? And how can you feel it in your very own body at this moment? You may feel it as your breath coming and going or your heart rhythm or just a hum in your skin or a hum of this energy. But just give yourself a moment to not worry about anything, to just feel alive the way you feel it at this moment.

[04:26]

Fall equinox is harvest time, acknowledgement of growth, of growing what you've grown through the summer, of natural evolution, also of our organic being. And some of us feel like We are in the fall of our lifetime. Some of us feel like we are at the end of the fall of our lifetime. Some feel like we're in spring in our lifetime. So that's different. But to just also see where that equinox just gives us a possibility to pay a little bit attention and focus on that. It's also an invitation to level the playing field because astronomically there is a little level playing field right now at the Equinix Mox and to unidentify.

[05:58]

So there is this that you may have seen of Shiva, who is one person together with Adharnari, which is Shiva is male and his consort is female and their one body. And that's also an expression of the equinox. half man, half woman. And also in our tradition, we actually are very much invited to not identify, neither with our body, nor with our thoughts, nor with our feelings, to feel them, to acknowledge them, but not to identify.

[07:08]

the moment we identify it becomes a fixed thing and I had a wonderful experience of a fixed idea because fixed ideas are also often not conscious but they affect our perception absolutely so My partner Marcia and I, we traveled to Switzerland and we traveled early this year because I was raised and born in Switzerland and lived there for 41 years. So one of the very special memories I have is the scent of linden trees when they're blooming. It's the most soothing, wonderful scent. And when I smell it, I want to just lie down so I don't need any other energy but can only smell.

[08:16]

I don't need energy to stand up or anything. I can lie down and just be only nose smelling. So we went early, so I would, after years, after I don't know how many tens of years, to smell linden trees again. And we went to Switzerland. So in the place we live, we look out the bedroom window and across. Oh, for me, linden trees are also connected. I know them from Zurich, living in Zurich, and from living in Basel. So linden tree, Zurich, Basel. But we were in Neuchâtel, and outside the bedroom window, I looked at the huge linden tree on the hillside, like five minutes ago, away, three minutes away. But Linden tree, Zurich, Basel. It never occurred to me to go check this tree out to see when is it going to bloom.

[09:19]

And we probably were not there when it bloomed, but I still, Zurich and Basel, even though Linden tree, I identified as Linden tree, but it didn't make the connection. So in the end, we raced to Zurich and we're too late to smell any linden trees. They all had finished blooming. They don't bloom for a very long time. There are two kinds, one earlier, one later. But it absolutely was a fixed idea and it didn't allow the perception to actually connect with me. And that's what happens to all of us when we have a fixed idea. It shapes what we can perceive even though something else is standing in front of our eyes, staring us in the face. So it was wonderful. I was grateful for that experience because I knew this intellectually, but to really experience it and see it every day and see all the... It was ready, full of...

[10:34]

but they didn't click. So, to not identify is one of the big challenges, but for that also we need to really be interested in recognizing and discovering what kind of fixed ideas we have that might do that to us. And there's a beautiful... poem by Hafez, a Persian lyric who lived in the 14th century. And one of his poems is, I have learned so much. I have learned so much from God that I can no longer call myself a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.

[11:36]

The truth has shared so much of itself with me that I can no longer call myself a man, a woman, an angel, or even a pure soul. Or even a pure soul. Love. has befriended Hafez so completely, it has turned to ash and freed me of every concept and image my mind has ever known. So that's how he expresses this. What we all... Our being actually aspires to get to that place where we are not run by ideas, by concepts, by feelings, by physical sensations, that we acknowledge them, but they're not running our life.

[12:48]

Then there is another part of today which is very auspicious, which is that three students of this temple are going to take vows or receive the precepts as priests, which is they are actually vowing to receive Renounce worldly affairs, renounce fixed ideas, renounce being trapped and be free. Aspire to unconditional love, like Hafez says somewhere, and love says, I will, I will take care of God. Everything that is near, level playing field, radical respect to everything, not just, oh, I like this and I don't like this, or you deserve respect and you don't, or you come up with your own examples, which we all have innumerable, I'm sure.

[14:26]

I certainly do. So we have a priest ordination this afternoon in this temple. They renounce worldly affairs like these attachments and identifications, and that's called renunciation. So it's also called leaving home ceremony. And there are many ways you can think about this. You can think about your physical home, you have... you can think about family, you can think about... But really it is the ideas we have created about ourselves, our fixed ideas, and they have become a home for us. We feel just, so that's me. Even if we're suffering, we feel, well, that's me and that's always been that way. And we're... recognize it, and it feels very familiar and home.

[15:30]

And that is the most profound home we're leaving. Because we may never leave the hometown, we don't necessarily have to leave our families. It's just that shift from being attached and identified to freely and equally connected. taking care and nourish and sustain connections in a liberating and liberated way. So they're not transactional. They stop being transactional. I'm nice to you, but you better now be nice to me. Or what do I get in return for an offering? They vow to live for the benefit of all beings. That's also a form of leaving home.

[16:33]

They hand themselves over to the universe. And it's what all our beings, which is not more than what we think about ourselves, our beings is a... holographic 360 degree simultaneous dynamic event. It's not a linear event. But when we think about ourselves, it's in sentences which are linear and it's narrow. It's on a thin line. And we have a little building with building blocks that we are familiar, but that's not the being we are. The being we are is life expressing itself through you in a very particular way. And that wants to be expressed fully and completely.

[17:38]

And our conditionings and how we keep ourselves conditioned by self-talk is limiting that capacity. So those three people are vowing to follow that intention inner way-seeking heart and mind, which we all have. It's not the Buddhist thing. It's called in Buddhism Buddha nature, but in Christianity it's called soul. It can be called many names. It's just life wanting to express itself fully and always be rich available to express itself fully. So it doesn't ever say, well, you didn't do it for 40 years, so forget it. I'm not there anymore. Whenever we are available, it's right there and expresses itself. So that's also a nice thing to know.

[18:42]

It is never too late. So I find that very encouraging. Also, priest ordination. In this tradition, you receive priest ordination from a mentor or a teacher. So there has to be a student-teacher relationship that is established. And that is quite a thing. If we're lucky, we have to go through heaven and and hell and everything in between together. Because it's a profound, profound connection being to being that then brings up stuff that we have committed ourselves to never feel again or to avoid or to, because it's bad or it's dangerous.

[19:53]

But if the relationship is being-to-being, it will come up and it will rattle the playing field. The student might say, I'm out of here, I'm looking for somebody else. Or the teacher might wish, how can I get rid of that student? Because it does it to both. The student-teacher relationship is an opportunity and a challenge equally for the teacher as is for the student. The student teaches the teacher as much as the teacher may help the student. Carl Jung talks about this as alchemical processes. He studied the medieval alchemy and understood it as an expression of actually psychological processes, and I looked up on a website something that you might be really interested in checking out for yourself.

[21:06]

He had prophecies, and there is a place, where is it? I'm not following my script here. That's called Jung's... Prophetic Visions. And it's from the Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences. And there are three parts to it. And it talks about personal evolution or personal what is the word? Well, transformation, but Individuation, he calls it individuation, becoming your full being. It's a transformative process. And so he talks about it, what a person goes through, those phases, but he also looks at society as going, human society going through those phases.

[22:15]

And it's very interesting to read at this time when so many things, are not what they used to be, or show the backside of what we were looking at. We are seeing the shadow side of a lot of things that are not new, but they now are much more effective. The climate, the inequality, the nature's catastrophes, the pandemic, the crisis, different realities we suddenly find ourselves in that do not, we don't have a shared reality anymore that we can say we agree to. And he talks about that as a phase we go through in evolution and also as a necessary phase. So I found it really helpful because to me it ties in

[23:19]

what happens in a student-teacher relationship or can happen, and what happens in the world and what happens to every individual that's on the path of liberation, whatever that path is. It's not a possession of the Buddha's teaching. sometimes it's time for a student and a teacher to part ways. Not because they're not willing to work through things, but because what they could do together is achieved and for the next chapter it might be a different relationship.

[24:24]

That's necessary. I do think, and we all maybe have our own sense of that, is that these times in which we live at this moment are challenging us to really carefully look at what we perceive, what we do not want to perceive, I like more watching MSNBC than watching Fox News.

[25:26]

Because one agrees more with how I see the things than the other. But do I now never look at the other because only look at what confirms what I think I already know? Or do I allow that ambiguity and that tension and that discomfort do I kind of exclude that reality and say oh there are only about 60 million people so I can kind of not think about them and they think the same about me so you know it's so we are challenged to really look at those things personally and what can we do so And when we challenge that, it is this integration of our sense of being. Because we have created habits around how to maintain that and feel like we stay in the known rather than being thrown into the not knowing, where we don't know, where we have to find a new way.

[26:45]

But I think we are all at this point really challenged. What can we do? And so, also the fact, one of the ancestors of this lineage, one of the founders of the Soto Zen School, A.A. Dogen, Senji, he wrote Your practice, it's part of a quote, but your practice affects the entire earth and the entire sky in the ten directions. Although not noticed by you or others, it is so. And we always practice something. Every moment we practice something.

[27:48]

We practice kindness, or we practice aversion, or we practice grasping, or we practice wishing, or we practice rejection, or we practice being still, or we practice distracting ourselves. We're always practicing. Everything we do, think, feel sends energy throughout the whole universe because we are completely absolutely interconnected. And that's what he's expressing with that sentence. And so, I think for all of us, regardless on what path we find ourselves, I think it's really important that we cultivate, we bring intention to what we do. what we think, what we feel, and not let ourselves be run by habits.

[28:55]

And so that we can make a continuous effort and understand, because it can be really overwhelming to listen to the news, because there are so many things we have... no power to do anything much about. And we forget to look what is within my reach, what is in my circle, what is in my everyday and cultivate our intention there. How can I reduce the use of plastic in my own everyday life? And it takes an effort. It takes extra effort to do it. I have to think, well, how, oh, where do I buy my stuff? Do I bring my own bags? Do I use the plastic bags that are in the store? I can't just do it how I used to do it anymore.

[29:59]

If I take the reality that somebody told me in 2000, I don't know when, who said that to me? There will be more plastic bags in the ocean than something horrific. I can't remember. But it's just absolutely, I mean, we're going to suffocate on plastic in a foreseeable time. I think it was 2050 or something like that. Anyway, so can we do what's in the reach, of my reach, and in my life, And what connections are there? And can I cultivate them in sustainable, kind, respectful ways? That will keep us balanced and not so overwhelmed by that we hear everything from all over the world now and keep us more sane.

[31:07]

So I would like to stop with reading the Hafez poem one more time. Oh, actually, I would like to read something else. There is a piece that Karl Friedgraf Durkheim wrote that is also speaking about what it takes to really wake up, to get out of our habituated comfort zones which keep us actually imprisoned and our being in prison and keep us disconnected from the complete interconnection in which we actually live.

[32:27]

And it's called the way of transformation. The person who being really on the way falls upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers them refuge and comfort and encourages their old self to survive. Rather, they will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help them to risk themselves so that they may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it, thus making of it a raft that leads to the far shore. Only to the extent that that we expose ourselves over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within us.

[33:39]

In this lies the dignity of daring. Thus, the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude which allows us to acquire a state of harmony and peace wherein nothing can ever trouble us. On the contrary, practice should teach us to let ourselves be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken, and battered. That is to say, it would enable us to dare to let go of our futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain and a comfortable life in order that we may discover in doing battle with the forces that oppose us that which awaits us beyond the world of opposites. The first necessity is that we should have the courage to face life and to encounter all that is most perilous in the world.

[34:53]

When this is possible, meditation itself becomes the means by which we accept and welcome the demons which arise from the unconscious, a process very different from the practice of concentration on some object as a protection against such forces. the more we learn wholeheartedly to confront the world that threatens us with isolation, the more are the depths of the ground of being revealed and the possibilities of new life and becoming opened. And that to me relates to when Hafez says, because Hafez writes, When you come out on the other side of all of this, being annihilated over and over, that image of yourself being just not possible any longer, he's coming out the other side and says that he cannot call himself anything anymore, neither a man nor a Buddhist nor a woman nor anything.

[36:18]

because love has befriended Hafiz so completely, has turned to ash and freed me, has turned to ash. So we have to go to fire to be turned to ash. And that's what Durkheim is talking about. And that's what we all do a really good effort to avoid and to get away from. But when we are committed... It helps us. And when we have friends that help us in that endeavor, then we can pass through it. So that's all I have to say for today. Thank you very much for being here. I wish you just a wonderful way forward in your very own lives. and finding your own little challenges and facing them and playing with them.

[37:25]

It's a big playing field. And company to play there. Look for company. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:58]

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