What a beautiful day today, huh? I'll try to make it short so we don't have to spend so much time inside. Well, yesterday I was at an all-day retreat. Not unusual for me to spend a day like that. But it was at an unusual place. It was at Google down the peninsula. So we practiced all day at Google, sitting and walking. And...

[01:00]

We talked a little bit about how sitting and walking and making an effort to be present with what comes and goes inside of us will help us to understand and live more beautifully with our emotions. That's what we were working with down there. So I was invited to Google to do a six weeks meditation course. And this was, we had a full day yesterday. It was the first, the kickoff of the course. And I was invited by a very nice man who I instantly took a liking to by the name of Chade Meng Tan, who was one of Google's original software engineers, one of the first people in 1999 who figured out Google. And he says that now he does software engineering in his spare time.

[02:03]

Because his actual job at Google is, his job title is he's Google's Jolly Good Fellow. And when he hands you his business card, this is what it says on his business card. Cheid Meng Tang, Jolly Good Fellow. And in parenthesis, underneath that, it says... which nobody can't deny. It's true. And I'm not sure exactly what you do if you're a jolly good fellow at Google, and I don't know if he's sure either, but this is what he does. And you know, you can imagine he's a very delightful guy. He's quite funny in a dry restrained way, you know, he tells a very funny joke and it takes you a minute and you realize that was a really funny joke.

[03:05]

So right away, we seem to, you know, share a kind of feeling for life. And so he confided in me. He said, I have a diabolical plan. So I said, well, man, what's your what's your diabolical plan? And he said, my plan is to achieve the goal of world peace. And I guess if you're a young fellow who started Google, you think you can do anything. So he's actually relatively, I mean, he's joking, but he's serious about this. His goal is world peace. And he said, and the way that I'm going to achieve this goal is by spreading Dharma everywhere. That's how I'm going to get world peace. And he's a very organized guy. And he said, and so my plan has three steps to it. He said, the first step is it starts with me.

[04:15]

I am going to be kind. I'm going to be as kind as I can be to as many people as possible every single day. People close to me and people further away from me as much as possible and I'm going to try to extend this a little bit every single day. So that's the first part of my plan. The second part is I am going to promote meditation. In order to do this I need to do two things. First, I have to show scientifically that meditation really works, that it really does change minds and hearts in a good way. And he said, and I realize that the Mind Life Institute with the Dalai Lama is already doing a lot of this work, so I don't have to do so much of it. But when we have our meditation course here at Google, we're going to measure the results. We're going to scientifically show the results of this course and show how the meditation is helping people.

[05:24]

The second thing we need to do is we need to make sure that meditation is available everywhere it should be viewed just like we view gyms now everywhere you know in every corner there's a gym and people know that it's a good idea to go to the gym it's good for your health not everybody goes but a lot of people go and everybody knows they should go so it should be the same with meditation there should be a meditation place everywhere and And maybe not everybody will go, but everybody will know they should go. And the reason how we're going to do this, he said, how we're going to make it clear to everyone how important meditation is, is that we are going to make the connection between meditation and what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence. Because now everybody knows how important that there's such a thing as emotional intelligence and how important this is. A lot of people think that meditation would be good, but they don't have time for it.

[06:32]

And even if you tell them, Ming thinks, even if you tell them that it will reduce stress, they still don't have time for it unless they're broken down with stress. And then they will have time for it. But most people, even if you tell them it reduces stress, this doesn't really make them want to do meditation, especially if you're from Google where you thrive on stress and you think stress is great. everyone wants love. And everyone wants to know how to connect with other people and how to understand and empathize with others and to be able to work with others successfully in whatever it is one is doing. So when you do your course, he told me, and people begin to understand how meditation helps you to really be able to connect with other people, then we'll be able to introduce meditation into the Google culture as a central part of what we do at Google.

[07:40]

By the way, Google is a strange place, an amazing place. They have a thing down, maybe you know about this because maybe they write about it in the paper, but they have a 100, I think it's a 100 yard rule. You know about this? That nobody at Google can be more than 100 yards from food. So there's all these micro kitchens everywhere, very fancy, but, you know, like coffee and different snacks. And nobody is more than 100 yards from one of these kitchens. There's numerous ones. And there are 17 cafes on the Google campus, all different, all serving really organic gourmet food. And it's all free. There's no money at all involved. They also have a huge number of, I don't know how many, but massage people on the staff. And there are massage rooms everywhere. If you get stressed out working, you can go in and get a massage anytime you want.

[08:44]

I've never heard of such things. And it's conceived of, I think, Google is conceived of as a college campus. It's kind of like an extension of, rather than like a business, it's a learning center. And so when you apply for a job at Google, even if you're older, they want to know your SAT scores, as if you were applying to graduate school. Anyway, it's got a very different atmosphere. It does feel much more like a college or university than it does like a corporation. So anyway, I guess Ming thinks that, well, if we can have these things, why couldn't we also have meditation? as a central part of the, I mean, none of these things that are offered are, nobody's coerced into them, but they're all there on campus and they're all offered and people avail themselves of them. So why not meditation? And if we can do that, he said, and we can get all the Googlers meditating, then everybody's interested in Google and we'll put it in the newspaper and before you know it, everybody will want to meditate.

[09:52]

Just like everybody wants to do whatever Google does, then everybody will want to meditate. So he said, This is my diabolical plan. And he has many other ancillary aspects to this. He has a plan for peace in the Middle East and so on. He has all these plans. But this is the heart of his diabolical plan. So I said to him, well, that's great. I have more or less the same diabolical plan. So let's conspire together. The same plan to bring about world peace. through practice, although I think he and I are operating on different timelines. Being older, you know, I have a more longer timeline. I think he's thinking that this can happen very soon. And I'm thinking maybe longer. But it's the same plan. And, you know, this...

[10:57]

tells you, I mean, when you think about this plan, it tells you that you can't really do spiritual practice for yourself. You might start out that way. You might come to do spiritual practice for some personal reason to somehow help your life to reduce your stress or your suffering, to bring more happiness, more awareness to your life, to help you be more compassionate or something like that. But as soon as you begin to do the practice, you find that it's impossible to avoid a confrontation with the poisons in our own hearts. the different wounds that we've suffered, the disappointments we've known, the small or large dysfunctions that are inside of all of us as a consequence of these wounds and these things that have happened.

[12:11]

So at the beginning, you know, it's very shocking. Like we were talking about measuring the effects of the meditation course at Google, and we were saying that actually when you do that, usually it turns out that A six-week meditation course makes things worse. So if you measure it, you'll find that things actually, people will report that things got worse. And it's not because things got worse. It's because before they didn't notice. I thought I was doing fine. And now after I start paying attention, I see what a mess it all is. So I'm much worse off now than I was before. So it has to get worse before it gets better. And we have to learn how to be patient with all of this that is uncovered within ourselves. And we find that when we are willing to be honest about it and just pay attention and be aware of what's there without dismay and without resistance and without trying to fix things up, little by little we come to understand our own lives and the lives of others because

[13:22]

Others' lives are, the details can be radically different, but more or less others' lives are like ours. And we come to the place, and it doesn't really take so long, when we can forgive. We can forgive ourselves, and we can forgive others, and when we can forgive, little by little, we can heal. And when that starts to happen, we'll become like men. We'll really want to be kind. We'll feel like this is what I really want to do. It doesn't make sense no matter what happens. Not to be kind. Starting with ourselves. I better be kind to myself. I haven't been so kind to myself. And kind to others. And little by little as we practice, we will learn how to act in all our words and deeds. from this place of kindness out of love and concern for others rather than out of the self-need and the self-preservation that we've been conditioned to feel is the sensible motivation for a lifetime.

[14:36]

So if we start down the road of practice as things unfold Naturally, we're going to be less and less concerned about ourselves and the things that we need and more and more concerned about just very naturally, you know, what can we do to benefit others? That's what really makes me happy is to think of that. And then we will also have a diabolical plan. We will see our personal lives and our personal spiritual practice in the context of of a diabolical plan to bring about peacefulness in the world, to change the world for the better, fundamentally change it. Not this or that detail of it, but basically shift how this world works. I said to Meng, so why did you take up meditation practice?

[15:42]

He said, out of desperation. He wrote a paper to the Google community explaining why we should have this course. And in this paper, he wrote about sort of recent research and understandings about the brain. So there's a lot of work being done now on the brain and how the brain works and so on. And I'm not too up on this, but... I was interested in some of the things that he was saying in this paper. And those of you who know about this more than I do, forgive me for my various inaccuracies. But this is what I got out of the paper. That there's a part of the brain called the neocortex. And this is the thinking, problem solving part of the brain. And there's another part of the brain called the limbic brain.

[16:47]

which is the older darker part of the brain that we know less about. And mostly when we learn something what we call learning and understanding something takes place within the neocortex. We hear something new a concept or an idea or a practice and we Understand it. We take it in. It fits into our pre-existing systems of information and understanding. And we incorporate it easily and we advance in our education. So we can learn a lot. Every year in school we learn a lot. And as we go on in life we learn a lot with our neocortical brain. Which is a very good learner. The neocortical brain is a very good learner. And a fast learner. So it's your neocortical brain that got your SAT scores and passed your exams and got you where you are today.

[17:58]

But when it comes to emotion, the deep-seated patterns of emotion that determine the shape of our personal lives and that really condition all our responses all the time, condition the way we relate to ourselves and the way we relate to others. The neocortex is not much help. This is where the limbic brain comes in. The limbic brain which was formed largely in childhood and is a very slow learner. Very difficult. It doesn't learn the way the neocortex learns. And in a way, you know, we can figure ourselves out emotionally. We can figure out with the neocortex, you know, how we got to be the way we are emotionally and so forth and so on.

[19:03]

But, and I think that, you know, as I was saying to somebody the other day, here in Northern California, we know more about these things than anybody on the planet has ever known. We're so aware of our so to speak. We're so aware of all of our, you know, how we got to be the way we are and our emotional shortcomings and so forth and so on. We all know about ourselves, you know, pretty well. But maybe some of you have noticed that knowing these things doesn't necessarily change the way you are. It's a little frustrating. You know, you would hope because everything else, you know, you learn something and you learned it. But somehow we learn this, but learning it doesn't really change anything. Because the limbic brain is such a slow learner and it doesn't learn the same way that the neocortex learns. And conscious learning doesn't much influence the limbic brain.

[20:09]

It needs to be slowly, painstakingly trained over a long time with loving kindness, with patience, with persistence if it's going to grow, change. And this is where the meditation practice comes into working with emotions. Meditation practice is not something that you can figure out and do correctly. People sometimes criticize the Zen method of meditation because it's so vague and they don't tell you what to do very much. Other styles of meditation make it sound very reasonable. We'll just do this and then do that and then it'll all work out. In Zen, they don't tell you anything. And so people are critical of Zen for that. But I think it's just more realistic. It's an illusion that you can figure it out. Just do this and this and this and everything will be clear.

[21:11]

No, I don't think so. Meditation practice, you can't figure out. And you can't... Just do it correctly and get good results. It works on you slowly. It works on you in a dark way, meaning not in the light of consciousness. And from the inside out. Little by little by little. Breath by breath by breath. As your awareness, your simple capacity to be present with what's going on increases. Little by little by little, somehow, without even being able to identify it, you change. There's a saying in Zen, remake the deeds of the past, but don't remake the person of the past. Remake the deeds of the past, but don't remake the person of the past.

[22:17]

I think this means that through our daily, yearly, decades long practice, we slowly but surely actually redo our past. When we bring the illumination of our awareness to our emotional patterns, they do start to change. We all think of the past. These are the things that happen. The past is fixed and can't be changed. But the only actual reality of the past is how it's manifested in the present. In our memory, in our feelings, in our actions. And this means that the past is more than objective. It's subjective. means that the past in its essential nature can be changed and is changing all the time.

[23:32]

So we redo the deeds of the past through our present engagement with our practice. But we don't redo the person of the past. This means that the person conditioned by the past doesn't need to be recreated in the present. That's something we're doing. We don't need to do that. Whatever we have done in the past, whatever has been done to us in the past, we are not that person now. And through the careful daily weekly, monthly, yearly, decades-long effort of our meditation practice, we see this. We understand how this is so. And we know that it's possible to give up, let go of the person that was conditioned by the past.

[24:43]

And when you first realize that, it's a little frightening. And I think a lot of times people realize that and are scared off by it and don't go any further. It's frightening because even though we all would like to be free of the person of the past, it's the only person we know in ourselves. And we think, my God, if I wasn't any longer frightened, depressed, feeling stopped, lonely, wounded, angry, whatever it is. If I wasn't that anymore, what would I be? I don't know. I'm a little scared. It's like dropping off a cliff. Where am I going to land? So it takes a certain amount of courage to become a different person. But we usually practice in the context of friends and community.

[25:51]

And the safe situation of practice helps us to find the courage. And then we see, well, it's not so hard. We can do that. And it's a very joyful thing to do. So that was yesterday at Google. And then before that, I was in a five-day session. Little community in the Bay Area, every day's end, has an annual session. And we just ended on Friday. And some of you in the room, I know we're there. And it was a beautiful week together. Five days, actually. We sat. We ate. We chanted. We bowed. We walked up and down. We wore robes.

[26:53]

We offered incense. But mostly what we did, which was so beautiful, was we worked together to cultivate an unusually deep silence. It was a very silent week. And in the silence, so many things could safely arise and gently pass away. And it was a very surprising week, the things that happened. We have a practice period going on in every day's end, and also there's a practice period going on here. And we have twin Megs, force yourself, head monk of the practice period. Our head monk is named Meg, and the head monk here is named Meg. Meg is over there. So we have twin Meg, practice period. It's a dynamite thing.

[27:54]

I recommend it. So our Meg, Meg Alexander, gave some beautiful talks in the session. And it's a long story, but to make a long story short she ended up talking extensively about her mother. She gave a detailed, compassionate biography of her mother. It was really moving, a vivid portrait of her mother, but a realistic portrait. All the problems that her mother had had, all the tragedies of her mother's life, and all the triumphs and courage of her mother at the same time, and all the ways in which the difficulty of her mother's life had influenced her and made her, Meg's life, difficult for many, many years.

[29:07]

And I don't think anybody had ever done that, you know. I recommend it, Meg, if you have more talks to give. It was amazing. She just went on at length in a beautiful way about her mother. And of course, in the silence, it made everybody also think about their own mothers and fathers and their families. And it made everybody try to follow Meg's lead to learn how to forgive their parents for being who they were and to forgive themselves for being, you know, each practitioner to forgive herself himself for who They had become because of that early conditioning. And later in the session, we had a memorial service, which I think is happening. The same service is happening here at Green Gulch today, right? Later in the afternoon or five o'clock, yeah.

[30:12]

Sejiki ceremony, which is a special. We have memorial services all the time, small ones, but this is a big one. where we all come together to honor those who've passed away, not only during the year, but in the years past as well. And so many names are read in a ceremony, hundreds of names. It's very moving, especially since we had been practicing this way in the session, remembering the past. The memorial service was particularly wonderful. And we had on the altar the names of more than a dozen people who had passed away this year and we lost some precious friends this year. Gil Smolin, Julie's husband, passed away this year. His funeral was just a few weeks ago and he was a wonderful person, an unusual person who was really active in Zen Center and

[31:16]

Those of you who have been around long enough to remember when we created our ethics policy. Ethics is a very difficult thing, you know. So we had this ethics policy and Gil was on that committee that was a very famous thing when we did this. It was controversial and complicated and Gil saw that through. He was a kind of world famous optometrist, expert on the eye. So in the 80s he went to India to help people who had leprosy because leprosy affects the eyes. He went to India to help with that and went back a number of years after his initial trip. And it was reported that he had said, I went there to India to help these poor people in their eye disease. And I didn't realize that they would be helping me much more than I was helping them.

[32:20]

He said, they were in a pathetic state. They were poverty stricken and they had disease and they were, you know, they had nothing. But they were happy. They were way happier than I was. And my friends, you know, who are doing well and happy. They're happier than my friends. And that's when he began spiritual practice, seeing the spirit of the people in India. But then he got ALS, which is a terrible disease where you lose all your functions and faculties. And as his body went down, his heart came up. And he was always a wonderful, friendly, compassionate person, but the depth of his compassion... toward the end was truly extraordinary. And one person told me that at the end of his funeral, that she would go to visit him and you couldn't understand him talking anymore.

[33:32]

And he would say something as you left and she couldn't understand what he was saying. And later she realized he was saying, I love you. Every person that came to see him, when they left, he said, I love you to each person. And he told me that one time when I could still understand his words, he said, yeah, I never realized how close we all are, all people who share the same heart. I never realized that before, how intimate that was. He was very open about what he was going through and so people were open with him and every connection was really powerful. So this was a beautiful story and a tremendous loss to our community. Also on that altar with the names of people who have passed away this year, it so happened that there were three sisters, three sisters of three of the people who were in the retreat in the Sashen.

[34:39]

And all three of the sisters were sisters who were not so old. And they were all sisters who had died fairly young, suffering from depression, alcoholism or some combination of these things. And they died in sad, sad ways after long, many, many years of sadness. And I know we can all relate to this. I don't think there's any family that doesn't have somebody with this kind of suffering. Because the world is full of sorrow. And some people are lucky. They can distance themselves from it. They can find a lot of useful things to do or not so useful things to do and not think about it much. And then there are others who don't seem to have the knack for that and figure out how to distance themselves from the suffering.

[35:49]

They can't avoid it. They can't overcome it, but they can't avoid it. And little by little by little, it pulls them down. And sometimes we can think, oh, these poor people, you know, they couldn't hack it. But maybe they receive the suffering on our behalf. it goes to some people. And they suffer for us. So, because of Meg's talk, there was a lot of experiencing of our past conditioning and of our deep emotional conditioning. And one person in the session came to me and he said that he for the first time could see and heal the suffering that he felt as a child.

[36:52]

Because when he was a young boy his parents were taken away from him and sent to the Nazi death camps and never came back. He was living in Hungary. And he was only a small boy so They didn't want to tell him what had happened, so they didn't tell him. They never told him. His parents just left one day, and he didn't know why. And, of course, a little boy thinks, well, I guess they don't like me anymore. I guess they don't want me anymore. And he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle who raised him, but not in a kind way. I mean, I guess they were terrorized by what was happening. They were Catholics, so they were not taken to the death camps. And he spent the rest of his life expecting to be abandoned at any moment by everybody he knew.

[38:02]

And this was so striking to me because the very next person who came into the interview room was a German person who was born in Germany around the same age. Now he's an American citizen but he was a child in Germany during the war. He was from a city like many other cities in Germany that had been bombed. 40,000 people killed and most of the city level Just imagine for a moment Southern Marin, 40,000 people, 40,000 people in this area bombed out of existence and the buildings that we see around us leveled. How would you feel if you went through your days, your weeks, your years in that environment?

[39:11]

Although my friend's family was not killed in that bombing, their house was bombed to smithereens, and in the house was my friend's dad's business. And his father could never reestablish the business, could never support his family after that, and committed suicide. this my friend had been living with for 50 or 60 years and in the silence of the retreat could find some measure of healing. So when we hear stories like this and such stories I hope go far beyond what most of us have had to deal with in our lives.

[40:17]

But when we hear stories like this, we remember how strong is the suffering in the world. And we know how much it will take to make things better. So I'm impressed by the power of silence by the power of meditation practice to heal. And also by the power of ritual. Because it's not as if meditation practice were some technique absent from a whole context. The practice of meditation exists within the context of the silence and the community and the ritual that holds it all. That's really the only thing, I think, big enough to hold the measure, this tremendous measure of the world's suffering.

[41:25]

The only thing big enough to hold us through our own difficulties and pass them and into a wider and more poignant feeling of compassion. And this is what we're trying to do, I think, here at Green Gulch at Zen Center. at Everyday Zen and other places but I think especially actually here at Zen Center to preserve this practice and these powerful forms of ritual that are one of many ways of holding and transforming suffering So my friend Meng is very enthusiastic about spreading meditation and getting the whole world to meditate.

[42:30]

And as he puts it, upgrading the limbic brain. And this is a great idea. I'm hoping for this myself. But I think also there's more to it than this too. You know, I appreciate Meng's ideas and want to support him, but to me, you know, I'm not trying to get a million, a billion people to meditate. I think it would be great, but it doesn't make much difference to me how many millions. I'm not counting, you know. I'm thinking I'm more successful if I have more people, you know. If we have a million, 50 million people, how many people will be enough? So for me, the point is not a million or a thousand or a hundred.

[43:32]

The point is one person. One person that I can meet face to face and see that person's wisdom increase and compassion increase and suffering decrease. Whoever appears, that one person, if they can do that, the world is changed. And all of us have to do our best. Each one of us does. To take the full measure of responsibility for our humanness. This is a very small, lonely planet. And there aren't very many of us on it. and so there's a reason why we're here we all have a big responsibility so each one of us has to be strong enough and courageous enough to take our piece of that responsibility to take responsibility for having a human heart that is vulnerable can feel

[44:50]

can care, can act. So I hope you two will develop a diabolical plan and dedicate yourself to carrying it out. I'm doing this. I'm trying. So let's try to do this together, joining together for this plan. Thanks very much for your attention this morning. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[45:49]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_95.33