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 welcome to all of those of you who are online and are seeing us here from around the world it's so great to have you here with us It's hard to even know how many people might be with us this evening. We have probably 30, 35 here in the Buddha Hall in San Francisco. Let's just take a deep breath. So I want to start off this evening talking about a that I had about 30 years ago, and I was working in the Middle East with young men that had Down syndrome and cerebral palsy.

[01:06]

I was working in an industrial woodshop, and in this woodshop, they had a yearly trip that would go out to the Dead Sea. And I was surprised at this because the Dead Sea is something that is... You don't want to get your eyes with any of the water. You don't want to splash around. It can be really disconcerting to be in a situation where you go under the water or you get splashed at the Dead Sea. And here we had a bunch of individuals who had Down syndrome or cerebral palsy, and we were going to go to the Dead Sea. So I was a little bit worried of what might happen. I realized that the main thing that we needed to do was to be able to keep the young men home and to not worry. They could understand about the Dead Sea and about not splashing around. But if any sort of forgetfulness happened or if people got panicked, a lot of negative things could happen.

[02:11]

If you've ever been to the Dead Sea and you get the water in your eyes, you need to kind of like split and let everything dry for about two minutes before you try to open them or you'll have a lot of pain. And there we were in the water and um i took some of the young men out to experience you know the water and i just told them you know don't splash don't put your head under the water and you can just move around but um this is something that will really hurt if you do and so we had a buddy system and a lot of them joined hands and they would remind each other not to splash around about 20 minutes in though one young man forgot And he splashed himself with some water on accident in his face. And he panicked. And he tried to get it out by splashing more water in his face. And then he tried to rub it out with his hands. And, of course, this caused all sorts of pain.

[03:14]

And he was crying and thrashing around in the Dead Sea and about to go under. And I had to go and actually physically take him out of the water. And to bring him up onto the shore underneath the tree and to get him water that he could dry his eyes out with and a towel. And it was very just overwhelming, the body reaction that he had. He was shaking and crying. And he wanted to go back and lie in the bus and just be away from everyone under a blanket. And he just couldn't take anymore. He was overwhelmed. He was overwhelmed. And I've thought about that situation many times since it happened. And it actually, in a very small way, is a microcosm of what happens to me whenever I get afraid. And whenever I have fear. I start to have a mild tightness.

[04:18]

I don't think so clearly. I start to do things that might make it a little bit worse. And then if it proceeds and it goes far enough, eventually I might be overwhelmed. And I might not be able to take much more today or the next 10 minutes or what have you. It might just be too much. What I want to talk about this evening has to do with something that's really core to the practice of Zen. And that is how the practice of Zen integrates our fears. so that we can show up for life and show up for each other. How to integrate our fears is something that we have inherent in our Zen practice, so that we can see how to engage. And the first point is that objects in the mirror are often much more or less scary than they appear.

[05:20]

But they are what appears. And I was reading this article by Judith Leaf, who, if you've ever read her, she's been in a lot of the major publications. She was a student of Trungpa Rinpoche. And she had this to say in regard to fear. She said, the essential cause of our suffering and anxiety is ignorance and the nature of reality and craving and clinging to something that's illusory. That is referred to as ego. And the gasoline in the vehicle of ego is fear. Ego thrives on fear. So unless we figure out the problem of fear, we will never understand or embody any sense of egolessness or selfishness. Our fears are the gasoline for our ego, for the protecting of ourselves, for clinging onto things. And what about these fears that we have?

[06:23]

Every single person has fears, but some of them feel more justified than others. And when I look at other people, sometimes I see their fear and I'm just like, why would you be afraid of that? And I'm sure people look at me and think the same sort of thing. I mean, there's even a fear of chickens. Now, I don't understand how somebody has a fear of chickens, but for someone that is actually real. It's called alacrophobia. It's a fear of chickens. And that is a real fear for someone. And it's just as rational as the different fears that I hold. Because every time I enter a room, I bring my own personal heralder. You know, the heralder from the king or the queen that would come in first, and it would say all the things about the person, but predispose everyone to the person that they're about to hear from. The heralder, you know, the lord of East Anglia, the baker of crumpets, the... You know, this or that, the winner of the foxhound, this heralder.

[07:26]

And every time we enter a room, we have our heralder coming forth from inside. And we tell people who we are, and we assume that other people might be able to see who we are. And we're telling each other all the time from our heralder. And there was a very interesting study done about this in regard to what it is that we see in other people's faces in regard to our moment-to-moment assumptions of what other people might be thinking about us. It was a doctor named Robert Kleck in Dartmouth, and he did this experiment in the 1990s. You might have heard of this experiment before. It's called the SCAR study. And what they did was they took 20 people and they had them visit a hospital waiting room and just sit in the waiting room. And just see what it's like, get to know the setting, the people, get some reaction.

[08:27]

And then the next day, they sent the same people back to the same hospital waiting rooms. But they had them first... have a scar put on their face. They brought in a movie makeup artist, and they put a scar on their face that looked really awful. And then they showed them the scar with a mirror, and they had them look at the scar, and they said, okay, now we're going to study people's reaction to you with this scar on. And then they got ready to go down the hallway and to go out around to where the hospital waiting room was, and they said, let's touch that scar up a little bit so it doesn't mess around, so it doesn't... fade. And what they didn't tell them was what they did on their face then was that they completely removed the scar. And so the people went into the waiting room and they were there for about half an hour interacting with people in the waiting room, looking at magazines, all the rest of that. Then they came back out and they were asked to write down their reactions, the difference between being in the waiting room the previous day with no scar and being in the waiting room today with a scar.

[09:32]

and all the stories were the same for all 20 people. How much people were staring at them now, how people were a little bit more rude, and they really wouldn't give them the time of day, people didn't really want to talk to me, all this sort of stuff. No scar. And the mind is a very, very powerful thing in regard to narrative, in regard to what it brings forth. our heralder that tells people who we are, and the entire life's work of this doctor, Dr. Kleck, boils down to this one statement. He has done some very interesting studies, but this one statement is that our own inner subjective world strongly influences our interpretation of the objective world. Our own inner subjective world strongly influences our interpretation of the objective world. In a sense, the degree to which I am wound up will have a direct impact on what I see.

[10:34]

One of my very favorite books in the science fiction realm is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And if you've ever read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you know that in there, there is an actual guide to the galaxy. And it tells people how to travel around all the different worlds and all the things to do in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And there is an actual guide in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And on the front cover, I don't know if any of you have read this, what does it say on the front cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Don't panic. Exactly. That's the number one thing. Don't panic. You can choke on something incredibly small. And if you talk to a doctor that will tell you about why someone can choke on something incredibly small, it's because the muscles will contract around that little tiny thing. And it completely blocks off the airwaves because there is a panic. And in fact, if the person was completely relaxed, they might even have room enough to breathe.

[11:39]

Don't panic. But how do we not panic? I mean, the last thing you want to say to a person who's agitated is, don't panic. That doesn't work. That's in the rational world. It's just something for us to remember when things start to unfurl, when things start to go in that sort of direction. And it's also something to remember when we're learning in the spiritual path, There is all sorts of periods of time when we don't know and when we're confused. Leonardo da Vinci called this the smoke period of learning. He was a person, of course, that was known for being a genius in so many different areas, in art, in science, in entrepreneurship, in language. He could write upside down and backwards. People said, how can you possibly learn all these things? What is the secret to learning? And he said, the secret where actually where genius is made, is in that part of learning.

[12:42]

Right when you start to learn, and you know just a little bit, but you're confused, it's called the smoke part of learning. Fumato is as he called it. It was the smoke part of learning. The part of learning when you feel like you're surrounded by smoke, you know a little bit, but you're confused. He said that is when the genius is made. And he said it's also what most people try to get out of as quickly as possible, because it's disconcerting. You want to know and have ideas and have a little bit more grounding. He said he liked to relish that part of learning as much as possible, was the smoke part of learning. It's the accepting that we don't see 2020 and that the universe is vast. That the world is vast. That the person in front of me is vast. And that that's okay. And that I don't get everything that's going on.

[13:44]

That will allow it to unfold. It's the first step to settling. That this is a normal state. The practice is like the Grand Canyon. And at first we have this little flashlight, and we see this little area, and we say, oh, look at that. And then the flashlight, you know, maybe get a little bit bigger flashlight, you know, and we can see like maybe a 10-foot radius. And we think, wow, that's really quite something. There's a lot here. But there's so much that we could never predict and could never see, even in one person. And to be able to relax around that not knowing, to be able to relax around the fact that there are always going to be new things that arise. And new ways that our fears might actually manifest. And to not tighten around them as much.

[14:46]

So how do we calm down? I mean, there's all sorts of things that bother us, trigger us, bring back memories of the past. And the last thing we would say to ourself or say to some other person is calm down. So what is it that we would say? Well, I think one thing that really illustrates this would be the analogy of taking a baby to the grocery store. So you have this nine month old baby and you're going to go to the grocery store. And you're going to get some frozen peas. And so you go to the frozen food section. And when you get to the frozen food section, of course, what happens? Well, in the frozen food section, you have all of these turbines blowing wind from the freezers. You have doors open and closing. You have a little bit chilly air.

[15:51]

And the nine-month-old gets a little bit frightened, and they start to cry. They're just scared. They're unsettled. Everything is different. What's going on here? And they start to cry. Now, the last thing you would do in that situation is start to explain rationally to the baby how come this is illogical. You know that what's going on here is not going to be accepted on a logical level. What you're going to do is you're going to try to have a connection with them that says this is okay. You're not approving. Yay, go baby, keep crying. But you're totally accepting. You're totally accepting that this is what's going on right now. The baby is crying. The baby is unsettled. The baby is afraid. And so what do you do? You make the baby feel spacious and like the what's going on right now is okay.

[16:55]

There's space for this. There's space to be overwhelmed. There's space to be afraid. This is what over time is going to allow the baby to integrate this fear and to be able to be in a place where they can go to the frozen food section when they're five and not be so worried. And you know that they will, and it's not going to become obvious to them because you explained it to them. And we work the exact same way. How do we settle? It starts off with our internal dialogue that there is space for this. We aren't cheering ourselves on, but we're saying that it's okay, that this is what's happening now. This is what's happening right now. One time I was at the Tassajara Monastery. It was over a decade ago, and there was... The reason I say over a decade is just so you'll know that nobody that you know now I'm talking about, but someone who came and went.

[18:04]

But it was a very straightforward person who was very honest about things. And we were sitting there about two weeks into Tassajara, our first Tongario practice period, and they were... looking at me on an off day, and they said, Michael, there is nothing to do here. And I just thought, you know, you're right, that there is nothing to do here. It seemed kind of boring, you know. You have no keys, no phone, no wallet. You have no internet. You have no... you know, bills to pay, you have no shopping to do, you have no one to see for dinner, you have, you know, you do the same thing, and you do it with two hands, and you do most of it in silence. Michael, there is nothing to do here. And I realize that some of what happens with the lack of being settled in the modern world when I reflect on it has to do with the overstimulation.

[19:11]

And some of the beauty of how the monastery experience is constructed is around letting people settle and allowing them the opportunity to do things one thing at a time with two hands, giving their full focus to the dishes. And the beauty of a three-minute meditation of just making the bed, not making the bed with headphones on, listening to a podcast, thinking about what I'm going to do when I get to work. Just the beauty of me and this bed. I'm lucky to have a bed. My bed has sheets and pillows, and it's just going to be me and the sheets and pillows for three minutes. Doing things fully with an intention. But the beauty of this is that it takes away a lot of the overstimulation, and it just lets me be with the thing that's happening. There is a study called the Hyperfocus and Productivity Project. And it's studied people who are anxious and get wound and how when people are really anxious and wound, their primal fears and the fears that they have in the past and their common fears and their triggers come up way more often when they are wound.

[20:27]

Not surprising. But the thing that was surprising in this study was what they came to in regard to what would counter people being wound up and anxious is and overstimulated with their technology and with their work. And so this individual named Chris Bailey, who is now famous for this study, and you can check it out online, he's done it in many different ways, but it's called the Hyperfocus and Productivity Project. And so he took all of his devices, his phone, his watch, his iPad, his computer, and he turned them off on the weekends or whenever he wasn't working. And then he took a vacation where he didn't touch any of them for seven days. And he tried to do an experiment to find out how long it took for him to actually calm down. Could he notice a cliff of calming down? And he said it took about seven days of no technology and nothing beeping at him or he wasn't watching TV.

[21:31]

He wasn't listening to podcasts. He was doing everything one thing at a time is what he found was like the best solution to do things one thing at a time. And it took seven days to reduce what he called overstimulation. And he realized that a lot of what he had before that he thought was being too distracted or not able to focus or all the rest of it was simply overstimulation. He thought he was drinking too much coffee. All of a sudden he found out that actually he could drink coffee. And it was other things that were being, you know, the root causes of this. And he said that then he started to realize that he had never, at least probably in the previous seven or eight years, never been bored. He had never been bored because he had all this stuff to take up the interval time when people would normally be bored. So he put this thing out to everyone on his podcast, and he had sent me ideas of things that I can do that are boring. I'm going to only do boring things. So he took a vacation, and he only did boring things for 30 days.

[22:35]

And then he blogged about it. He called Air Canada's baggage claim department and sat on hold for two hours trying to find his luggage. He read all of the terms and conditions to iTunes. He watched the clock for two hours. He just sat and watched it. He did everything that people sent him to do that would be boring. And he did boring things for an entire month. And he said that he got more great ideas Through this, for his job, for his life, what have you. Because a lot of what happens with coming up with good creative ideas comes from deliberately letting the mind rest. Scientists call it scatter focus. But it's something that Zen practitioners have known for some time. Just sweep the street. And we have a high respect for things will dawn on you. And just do the dishes. And don't do the dishes and listen to music. things will dawn on you. Chew on the koan, things will dawn on you.

[23:36]

Shifting attention actually really quickly, now they're able to study it and they can study the amount of loss of the use of glucose in the brain. And there's a higher electrical need when you're shifting between things. And basically we're wearing our brains out through shifting around. What sort of life do we embrace that starts to let us settle? When we think about the fears and the anxieties that we have, what's the context of the life that we're living? And do we take advantage of the opportunities that we're being taught in the Zen monastery and in the Zen teachings in regard to all the little spaces in life that we have lots of control over? Maybe we don't have control over some places that we are if we're working outside at a certain job or we have a lot of busyness with a family or with children. But there's all these spaces, making the bed, washing the dishes.

[24:39]

All the time that we have whenever we are doing things, how do we do them? Do we embrace those principles that will let us decompress? Or are we living in an overstimulated sort of way? Every morning we ground ourselves in something that is real. Something that we know is going on. It's not future tripping. It's not imagining things that someone is seeing this with a scar on our face. We ground ourselves in zazen. And we give ourselves one thing to do. One responsibility. Sit and breathe. Sit with a bunch of other people and breathe. It can't get more basic than that. We start the day off with one thing. And we try not to use zazen to be future tripping or past tripping. Counting our breath. Being with what's coming up. Not adding one thing to whatever comes up. The school of immovable sitting. Just being right there with the thing that's happening right now.

[25:41]

We start our day off grounding ourselves in something that is real. And not as a means of accomplishment. In Moon and a Dew Drop, which was a collection of essays by Dogen Zenji, the founder of this Zen school, edited by Kaz Tanahashi, he says, and initially quoting from Dogen, Zazen is not learning to do concentration. It is the Dharma gate of ease and joy. The Dharma gate of ease and joy. And then Kaz continues. This is a key. It is not the Dharma gate to ease and joy. It is the Dharma gate of ease and joy. Zazen isn't always fun. However, you are engaging right now what is arising and letting it be. Welcoming it in. It's not always fun. but we're in a welcoming hosting stance, arms open. Whatever's happening now, we're letting it happen.

[26:44]

We're letting it unfold. We're not going to war with ourselves. Touching the sacredness of that experience, all those arisings from the deep well that makes up you. Seeing ourselves can be daunting, but grounding ourselves in something that's real, And having an open stance to what's actually going on with us. Without pushing it away and without adding one bit to it. Giving ourselves something very, very simple to do. Sitting and breathing. Can I sit in the middle of my unfolding? That's very courageous. Because it's tempting to implode or to criticize myself. Oh, why do I always think of that? Or to analyze myself. Or it's tempting to go off into a narrative. To click the next button and to get away from the boredom or from the thing that's going on right now that doesn't seem so much fun.

[27:52]

Can I actually sit there with what's going on and not distract myself? To not go somewhere else? To not buy into any sort of narrative? But to just be right there with what's happening right now? Being spacious the way that we would with a baby who's in the frozen food section and doesn't get that there's nothing to be afraid of. All of our irrational fears, whether they be fears of chickens, or whether they be fears that we have from childhood, or the thing that's happening that we thought of from yesterday, or the thing that might happen tomorrow. Can we let all those things go for a little bit and be spacious with ourselves? The way that we would with a baby. We aren't saying, yay, that's a good thing that came up. It's not approval practice, but it's total acceptance practice. Accepting what's happening right now. That can be very, very difficult. The baby will understand the frozen food section, but it is not through reasoning.

[29:01]

It's through how they were held. And that's how we understand and start working with integrating our fears is how we hold ourselves. And the benefit to calming down is that you see what you didn't see before so much more clearly. All those young men at the Dead Sea, except for the one, who got panicked and had the terrible experience, they remembered, even with Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, they were together with their partner, remembering that we don't splash the water. And they were calm. And they could remember that because they were clear. And the things that we see when we're calm are so much more vast.

[30:08]

One of the things from that study, the gentleman I was telling you about before that had the study of hyperstimulation and overstimulation, was that he said that all of a sudden his awareness expanded. He didn't know how to explain it, but once he calmed down, his awareness expanded. He just became aware of so much more. And it's hard for us to describe to ourselves what it would be like to be more calm until we are It's like inheriting something that we didn't know even existed to inherit. Wouldn't it be nice to have tools in your emotional tool belt that you can't even imagine now that you couldn't even describe to yourself or to somebody else? Like describing water to a person who had never seen a liquid. How would you do that? They might grasp the concept on some level, but you're like, water is great. All the things you can do with water.

[31:09]

Water is amazing. And they're like, I'm just going to distract myself. All of the things that can come as far as the fruits of practice, we won't know. But how we will engage the world, the world right now needs people that are clear-headed and that are calm. There are so many things to do that need to be addressed. And we start with the next person. And inwardly, where we really started was with ourselves. Because the person in front of us is vast. But I can't see you and you can't see me until the reflection on the lake, you know, calms down a little bit. When there's a storm, I can't see anything on the surface of the lake. Once that storm is over and once it calms down, it's like glass. And I can start to see a lot more clearly.

[32:12]

And I start to hear you and you start to hear me. When I've calmed down a little bit and we have new tools in our tool belt. We do these things so that we can see. so that we can be with, so that we can bring our gift to the world, the Bodhisattva vow. There was an album in the early 90s that I loved the title of, and it was, So Tonight That I Might See. And it just leaves this abstract concept out there. Something is going on, something is going to happen. So that later I will be in the context of able to have more clarity. So tonight that I might see. I might make my bed and not listen to podcasts. And I might wash the dishes with two hands without listening to music.

[33:14]

And I might allow myself to calm and settle. So that maybe I can see you. I might show up to Zazen and really be there with my breath so that I can ground myself in something that is real rather than all the narratives that run through my head constantly like popcorn. The world needs our engagement. And if we learn to integrate our fear, we can be more calm more often. And when we are settled, we are more clearly able to see how to engage. 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.

[34:18]

For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:27]

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