Good evening. Am I audible? Good evening. Pass your seatbelts, it's going to be a rough night. All right? This is a very original moment for me.

[01:01]

I've never given a talk in this temple or any temple or on any radio station for which I was less prepared. I have all kinds of pieces. What? Well, let me see what pieces might still be available here for some things to be said about. I used to recite Gettysburg Address without any PA when I was a little boy. Shall I just start talking like I was a little boy? Great. It's fine? Yes, idiot.

[02:06]

Get that man's pay number. After that big 70, 90th birthday bash, I felt great. And I just took off like I hadn't stopped. And maybe you remember when you used to watch the Saturday morning cartoons, A man would run off a cliff and keep running and then look down. Well, that's what I did about a year ago. I looked down and it was a big mistake because I could see that I had run off a cliff. I'd run off a number of previous cliffs. I'd run off a Christian cliff, a humanist cliff, a Marxist cliff. And so I was totally prepared in one way to have it happen again, but it

[03:09]

What I was going to do with my life, I think I even announced in one talk, I'm going to spend the rest of my time finding out what I will do with the rest of my life. Some people were very practical. They said, why worry? You're very tired. They give you cake and sheets. What are you cussing with? But I had taken a number of vows in my childhood life. I knew that if I did not have something that I had to do, something that answered some question of mine, I just might as well not be living. So I set out on a search for that. And for a long time, I found that there was nothing there. The last time that happened, a psychiatrist sent me a sense center. But here I was in sense center, and who was going to send me someplace else? So I realized I had to keep it in the family.

[04:14]

And then came the moment not too long ago when I was told that my, what I thought was just aging, was a heart condition. And so I have one valve that slips and another that doesn't. And so I do my morning Sazen sometimes here in the Buddha Hall, so I spare myself a flight of stairs. But I still hadn't had talk for the night. But I finally put something together and woke up this morning and found that I had completely forgotten it. It's like I understand you people who can use computers, you touch a certain button and you lose everything. So Blanche was there, and I asked her, what were the five Buddhist fears? Because I was very definitely feeling the fifth one, speaking in front of an assembly. Now, for someone who'd been speaking in front of assembly visits and radio ever since he was five years old, that, you have to admit, was a pretty severe thing.

[05:27]

So she lined them out to me. And then she went about her business and then I forgot. So fortunately Vicki was there and she wrote them out for me. So here's the list that she gave me. Unusual states of mind. Loss of wealth and livelihood. Loss of reputation and fame. Loss of life and health and then speaking in front of an assembly. So let me try to wiggle into a talk a little distinctly by remembering my experience with those fears before they were Buddhist fears. I think that's sort of clear that something that happened to me before I started to practice became a Buddhist fear just because I was attached to it.

[06:28]

If the things that happened to you and then you came to Buddhism because of them, that would be one thing, but to call these Buddhist fears is rather unusual. Okay, so unusual states of mind. For the first 40 years of my life, I thought I was crazy, and some people believed it, and other people definitely said I was, until I found a doctor who told me at about 40 years of age, you're not crazy. You're just a... What's the word? Just a what? A chemical cripple. He was someone who was ahead of the serotonin understanding. He felt it coming. So I was relieved of my fear of going crazy because now I could just do it with full agreement on everybody else's... standing that I wasn't crazy.

[07:29]

Now that took care of that one. Then the next one was loss of wealth and livelihood. That was the big one. That was the time when I was tangling with the American Activities Committee, lost my job, and became suicidal. Then along with that went my loss of reputation as one of the leading talent in radio in San Francisco. And the effects it had on me as an individual and on my children and on Blanche if I had to go to work. And of course the loss of wealth, a couple, well, one million dollars by a conservative estimate. Now these are all Related to being a somebody, being a personality, being a featured radio person, being a husband, being a political leader, you name it.

[08:34]

They all have a connection with becoming a something or other. But there's one that's a little different. And that is the loss of life. Fortunately, fortunately. For me, that took place when I was three and a half years old. The year is 1918, the big flu epidemic throughout the world, and I am dying of diphtheria, which was an equivalent for children. They don't have diphtheria anymore. And I remember very clearly lying in my crib. My father silently praying next to me, and I'm wanting to die. I can see crossovers for maybe where the cafe is, a nice, fresh, clean bassinet.

[09:37]

And I wanted very much to go from this bed of pain to that clean bassinet. But my father, who was not, quote, a religious man, let me know he wanted me to stay. And so I did not allow myself to die, whatever self there was at that age. I didn't become the son he wanted, and he was not the father I needed. But here we are on that day of karma. I said I'd stay around, and how many people we got here tonight. So then I started wondering, how was it that... Before I came to Buddhism, some of these fears were there, who were Buddhist fears. And then I realized that they had become Buddhist fears because they can be altered, changed, moved, stopped by Buddhist practice, which is, of course, as some of us here know, Zaza.

[10:52]

Now, there... comes something that I have talked of many times before. I'm not going to do it again in any detail, but I want to make the point that at age, I had an experience, a physical experience that I called God-seeing, which turns out to be a Charles Kensho. And that kept me going through all the vicissitudes of trying to make my place in the world. But why should this all come up again and again and again? Because I have come to a place where I don't know my next step. I don't know my next step because of a poem by Katagiri Roshi, which we read during the practice period, called Perfect Life.

[12:05]

Perfect Life. Being told that it is impossible, one believes in despair. Is that so? Having been told that it is possible, one believes in excitement. That's right. But whichever is chosen, it does not fit one's heart neatly. And I think that the words that connect my memory of suffering and my inability to say what it is that I'm going to do with my life and whatever is left to be is possible. collected within the feeling of his words, not fitting one's heart completely. Each time the fitting began really to rub and get intense, drove me to another expression of it, trying to find a new solution to that which did not fit.

[13:11]

Being asked, what is unfitting? I don't know what it is. but my heart knows somehow. I have an irresistible desire to know what a mystery human is. And I remember one time in this post-taking that I did as a kid that I was going to learn all that there is to know. I feel an immense desire to know. As to this mystery, clarifying, knowing how to live, knowing how to walk with people, demonstrating and teaching, this is the Buddha. When I came to that line, I remember a lecture by Baker Roshi.

[14:11]

I think it was in Berkeley, or at least a Berkeley person was involved. one of the leading young men, very able in anything and everything that he did, had an exchange with Baker Roshi that went something like this. It started out as a simple question, what did you mean by whatever you said? And then they replied to each other and it became a mondo and it elevated in intensity and Find me, this young man said, well, if that was so, I'd be a Buddha. And immediately, Baker Rose, he shot back, don't you want to be a Buddha? And as he hesitated, I almost yelled, say yes! It was an intense moment to the three of us. He didn't say yes, but I did remember that he almost did.

[15:15]

So, Kategori Roshi's poem continues, from my human eyes, I feel it's really impossible to become a Buddha. But this I, regarding what the Buddha does, vows to practice, to aspire, to be resolute. And I tell myself, yes, I will. Just practice right here now and achieve continuity endlessly forever. This is living in vow, and herein is one's peaceful life to be found. That's not what I came to talk about, because I forgot what my response to this... I won't just call it a poem, this spiritual edict that... that he laid down.

[16:17]

This is the true stuff, and I recognize it, because I came, I saw it in practice at one place and came very close to it myself. Now, if Katagiri Roshi is right, I mean, by not that, I don't mean right philosophically, but if he's correct in his admonition to us as regards practice, I do have to pay him some mind now. And what gets me is that at the time that I had the experience of seeing God, the Ken Cho, I was a totally different person for those few moments. In fact, I told myself after it was over, you just disappeared. That was correct. You, Lou Hartman, father and grandfather, was a wealthy German immigrant and Jew hater.

[17:27]

I went to Sunday school. We shot rats with a rifle in the backyard. That me had disappeared for that instant. And who was left? Well, fortunately, the poet Rumi wrote poems as well as poetry, as most of you know. And he points out there are two kinds of intelligence. There are two kinds of intelligence. one acquired as a child in school, memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as the new sciences. With such intelligence, you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind of others in regard to your competence in retaining information.

[18:31]

You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge. always getting more marks on your preserving tablets. There's another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside of you, a spring overflowing its spring box, a freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid and it doesn't move from outside to inside through the conduits of plumbing learning. This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you moving out. To have come so close to Rumi at age five, I spent my, what does he call it here, plumbing,

[19:34]

With such intelligence, you rise in the world, you get ranked ahead and behind others. That education that was given to me by my grandfather, by my school teacher, by my minister, I tried to use that to get back to the moment when I saw the world when it wasn't working. But because I was a modern person, I came up, if you had to say, The circle was like this, and the God-seeing gap was in the middle, and this was the God-seeing side, and this was the plumbing side. I was trying to get across that gap with the plumbing intelligence, writing things down in my notebook, buying books, buying records, all of these things that would educate me so that I could do what I finally wanted to do, which was many years ago. Now when you give it any thought at all, that you're going to die someday is no big discovery.

[20:49]

But as you approach a time when it's possible that without getting hit by a truck, you might not be here the next time somebody talks. It alerts you. And all of a sudden, in the midst of all this confusion, and I really apologize for it, I came across a poem by a student of Colanchino's down in... Where am I? Ho-ho. Chocoji. Mary Kate Spencer, who was... 90 years old, when she died, and wrote this poem a week before she did, called A Solid Place. Mary Kate knew who she was.

[21:51]

It happened all of a sudden. She knew who she was. She'd been waiting a long time, a long time for this realization. It came suddenly to Mary Kate. She knew who she was, and then her whole life straightened out. No more ifs and ors or buts. No more reasons or excuses. She could talk to the doctor straight out. She didn't have to think. Her thoughts were all there waiting to be picked out. All Mary Kate had to do was open the door, and there they were, ready to come out in the right places. What a relief. have a solid place inside oneself to just let them out as they appear. Now, I submit for your consideration that if that is something associated with the last week of your life, why can't you do it for the last eight days of your life?

[22:59]

Or maybe your last 14, or even all the time that is left to you. Mary Kate knew who she was. It all happened of a sudden. She knew who she was and she'd been waiting it a long time. It came suddenly to Mary Kate. She knew who she was. And then her whole life straightened out. No more ifs or buts or ands or otherwise. No more reasons or excuses. She could talk to the doctor straight out. She didn't have to think. Her thoughts were all there waiting to be picked out. All that Mary Kate had to do was open the door and there they were, ready to come out in the right places. What a relief to have a solid place inside oneself that just lets them out as they appear. I submit that that solid place is one of the stops along Rumi's indicated path. I think that

[24:04]

where she stood was one of the stops on Rooney's pass. And that's what was left to me of all of the notes that I took for the months that I was getting ready to give this talk, which was a couple times transposed. moved because of other people's needing to have the space. And if it hadn't been for Mary-Kate's poem, I think I probably wouldn't even try to give a talk tonight. I still have to do what I set out to do in intention a year or two ago. We'll find out what it is that I am going to do the rest of my life. the intensity that I need to have from experience, not just do it for a hobby, not just do it for a habit, not just to keep yourself going, but to really believe deeply enough in something in yourself that lets you move in that direction.

[25:17]

It's another person's death that fits in here. A man who discovered the conditioned reflex? Pavlov. How many people said Pavlov? Nobel Prize winner. He evidently was a man who had disciples for students because when he was dying on a cold winter's night, the day where he had students in attendance, And he was not getting on with the business of the evening. And the people were sort of waiting. Didn't probably have hospice in those days, but they were doing their best to help him along. And one of them went out in the snow and rolled a snowball and put it in a bowl by his bed.

[26:25]

And they noticed that he perked up and began paying attention to that snowball. And finally, they heard him say, oh, so that's how it is. Carried his question to his very last breath. So if these things are attendant to one's dying, there's no reason, reason, notice, there must be something that stops it. There is no reason that that date of death Freedom cannot be advanced into your life. Why do you have to wait so long? It intrigues me. And maybe if I get it together enough, I will make that the purpose of my life, to find out what's going on with things like that.

[27:25]

Why do we have to wait so long for the liberation? Great day coming is not far off. What is that one? Oh, no, that wasn't the one I wanted. Nicodemus, the slave, was of African birth and was bought for a bag full of gold. He died long ago, very old. And his last sad request as they laid him to rest in the trunk of an old hollow tree, wake me up, was his call at the first break of day, wake me up, oh, the great jingle leaf, there's a great day coming and it's not far off. That sort of spirit would be very helpful for me. Maybe even help me sing. Oh, sorry, I got you here on the pretenses.

[28:26]

And then do you have any questions? I don't see how you could have. No, seriously. I've done it so much, came close so many times. That's first time at age three and a half was so... clear that there was no cussing. And then about three or four times before I was 21, I came within the breaths of dying. It's not the dying that's so bad. It's the leaving the undone things of relationships. That's hard. The dying itself is not. Yes, sir. What would you say then? You don't say unless you're trained to say.

[29:37]

Now, if I could take the flash of insight that I've had this evening in talking to you, being forced to talk to you because I didn't have anything else to say, and study it, then I might know. The whole hospice approach, the one that supported Mary Kate and her insight, is a skill. It's an art. What I would say to somebody is, no matter what their condition was, no, I won't even say it, no. I don't know what to say. What to say, what to say, what to say. Wonderful, you don't have any questions, thank you. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. Sneaky Pete, the last thing, what? No, I didn't say I died so many times.

[31:05]

I had almost done it. There is a difference, I assure you. I was saying, you're so far, I've never, ever, all the things that I've mentioned and talked about, having one way or another been my concern since, as I said, I was three and a half. I never once wondered where I came from or where I was going. Not once as a child, and therefore I never investigated it as an adult. Somebody said you pay attention to your breathing and the person sitting at your deathbed will say he gave his last breath at 10 or 3. You won't know it's your last one. It was just your next one. So that's where I am right now. And also I have the feeling since I don't have to talk anymore for my own sake that I won't have to worry about what I'm going to do the rest of my life.

[32:12]

which has always meant studying, understanding, telling people about it, and things like that. I might be able to do what somebody once said, just go sit in the sun with your kid. That's enough of the night, I think. Thank you very much. If we extend through every evening and place where the throne...

[32:49]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.19