and I'm really happy to be here. I'm a little nervous. I lived at Green Gulch for about eight years, a few years back, and now I'm living at our temple in the city. So this is like coming home, and you know how it is with family. I'm really happy to see the children, and I wanted to just say a few words to you before you get to go out and I think you're going to plant sunflower seeds, as far as I heard. And get your fingers in the dirt. So what I want to put up in front of you, a question, is a question I'm going to be talking to the grown-ups about when you leave. And it has something to do with making wishes. And I'm wondering... It's great to see some of these children who are now much more grown up than the last time I saw them.

[01:05]

So hi, Elizabeth. Have you ever made a wish that didn't come true? You ever wished for something that didn't actually happen? And how was that? Can you think of something? I'm going to tell you a little story about something that happened to me, but does anyone have a have a little story of their own about making a wish for something that didn't come true? Anyone want to say? Well, I'll just tell you my little story. When I was six years old, my mom was pregnant. And I already had a brother who was one year younger than I was. So when he was born, I was a little bit too young to worry about whether I was going to have a brother or a sister. So he just came along and he was part of the deal. So my brother and I, and then, so my mom was pregnant and I really wanted a little sister.

[02:11]

Has that ever happened to you? You want either a little brother or a little sister? So yeah, great. Hand raised, yeah, good, a couple, yeah, good three. So I kept it to myself, though. I didn't really want to burden anybody else with that. I think that's what I was thinking, although I was just six, so who knows. And I remember getting the call, and my mom was on the phone. She was in the hospital. My dad was with her. We were with my aunt, and she told me that I had a baby brother. And my heart sunk a little bit. It was like, oh, my wish didn't come true. But then my mom did a really, really helpful thing. And she said to me, what do you think we should name him? And she gave me two choices, one of which was a terrible choice, which was my dad's name, which was Edwin, which I still don't particularly like.

[03:17]

And And she said, should we name him Edwin or should we name him Michael? And I went, Michael. And to this day, this is my baby brother, Michael, who I adore, who I just, we had such a good time growing up together. And I feel like being given a way to accept what happened and to feel a part of his life. That was a very kind thing that my mom did. So think of maybe that if you have a wish that doesn't come true. Look at what did happen and see how you might be able to make something good of that because that's what you've got. So it turned out really well for me. I really am glad I have two brothers. And then I have a lot of little kind of granddaughters. almost granddaughters that I can play with now. So anyway, that's my story, and I hope the wishes that you make either come true or you can work with them if they don't.

[04:28]

Okay? So go plant sunflower seeds, which I hope maybe will grow. Thank you. Zan is a dangerous thing.

[05:55]

So, good morning again, children and grown-ups. I want to put out a disclaimer at the beginning. I know that this is billed as a Dharma talk, and it's true, there will be talking. But I like to think of this as more of a Dharma inquiry for which I need your input and support what I'm going to talk about is something that I'm very interested in. So it's been something I've been turning around actually since the last election and the presidential election. And it's about hope. And, of course, this came up for me with that iconic poster of Obama. There were two, one that said progress across the bottom and the other one that said hope. And I now actually have that poster in my hallway, partly encouraged by my friends who were helping me in this inquiry because I'm very suspicious about hope.

[07:12]

And I'd like to bring up some aspects of hope for your consideration. I haven't landed anywhere in particular, but there's a lot of thinking about this. and some of our Dharma teachers. And this is the other thing that started my inquiry. It's called When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. And she has a chapter called Hopelessness and Death. But I'm not going to just talk about those things today. She brings forward some aspects of hope that are actually counterproductive to Buddhist inquiry. So the other thing that came up for me as I've been investigating this is I was in New York talking to some people who were doing a wonderful program on compassionate care. And they sent me to their website where there's a video.

[08:14]

And at the beginning of the video, there's a poem. And I'm going to read it. It's very short. And to me, it's the context for this inquiry. It's by a man named Michael Looning. and it goes like this there are only two feelings love and fear there are only two languages love and fear there are only two activities love and fear there are only two motives two procedures two frameworks two results, love and fear. Love and fear. So looking at hope, you may know the myth of Pandora and Pandora's box.

[09:23]

And just to remind you, Zeus was rather upset when Prometheus stole fire. And so what he did was he had Pandora created, gave her all kinds of wonderful attributes so she'd be very attractive to humans, and gave her a box that he told her not to open. And Prometheus's brother married her. And during that time, Zeus made the one mistake of giving Pandora a quality called curiosity. So at one point, Pandora couldn't stand it anymore, and of course she opened the box. And out of the box came a sort of retribution for mankind having stolen fire from the gods. And all the ills of the world came out, all of the negative qualities, all of the plagues and difficulties. But at the bottom of the box was hope. Now,

[10:26]

One could look at that story, and eventually I think she did manage to release hope. But it was in there with all the ills of the world. Was it the antidote, or was it the very worst one? So this is something to consider. Hope, of course, is just a word, and right now there are many, many interpretations in this room of that word. So are we talking about passive hope, active hope? Are we talking about aspiration? Are we talking about greed? Are we talking about delusion? It could be any of those qualities wrapped up in this word hope. I like to look at the word aspiration. And when I look that word up, it has that.

[11:28]

a desire to achieve something. So hope and aspiration, that's one pairing. But also aspiration is the pronunciation of something while you're breathing out. So hope is an aspiration. Hope. Isn't that an interesting sound? Hope. Hope. That kind of hope comes from a heart that's sunk. You're all out of breath. I think that's an interesting way to look at how do you hold hope? Is that what it feels like to you? Also, aspiration is drawing matter into the lungs. And they aspirate it with a needle. You know, they take things out of you. So aspiration doesn't sound very healthy, does it? It can get you in big trouble. You can aspirate and not be able to breathe anymore, or you can lose all your breath in an aspiration.

[12:34]

It's an interesting way to turn that word. So I'd like to just mention some what I call not helpful qualities of hope, and maybe some helpful qualities of hope, and maybe, if I can get there, some middle way. Pema Chodron talks about our practice, our practice of inquiry, as being a practice that doesn't give us a ground to stand on. And this is where she comes down pretty heavily on hope. Hope tries, I think, to establish a ground to stand on. But that's not our way. Our way. is that we recognize that change is all there is, that everything is impermanent. So how does that go with hope?

[13:37]

What are we looking for? Are we looking for something that's going to stop the mystery? Are we looking for something that's going to help us control how much pain or how much joy we have? This is the... This is the danger of hope. And Pema points it out quite dramatically. So the Dharma, the study of the Dharma asks us to investigate some of our very basic assumptions. And such as, you know, believing in a solid self. And this... seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, activity of our life, motivation of our life, and thinking that there's something out there that is both responsible for our pain and pleasure and that we might be able to control if we were only clever enough.

[14:43]

These are some of the assumptions that we're asked to investigate. Maybe first with the question of, how's that working? How's that working? Keep those activities going. Have you tried just about every strategy in that realm? That's one of the best things about doing a long meditation retreat, for me, is that by about day three you run out of strategies. The most strategic person, and I consider myself fairly strategic, runs out of strategies. And what a relief. Your shoulders go down, your diaphragm relaxes, and you just can sit there and stop fighting the change. You can eventually see that beauty doesn't exist unless there's change. There's a relationship between beauty and change. So our practice leads us down that path, and it's often described as swimming upstream.

[15:52]

Practice of investigating the nature of reality is like swimming upstream, untying the knots, untying the knots that have locked us into these strategies. And if there is a specter of hope in there to hold on to, something to hold on to, Perhaps we need that along the way. Perhaps it's a cane or a crutch to help keep us stable until we can actually settle into our place and let go of expectations. As I was saying to the children, if we have an idea of how we want things to work out, we're not so prepared for when they don't. And I also like to think of if we think we know what's best, we're limiting ourselves to our own imaginations.

[17:01]

I have a pretty big imagination. I was in the imagination business before I moved into Zen Center. And I never imagined I'd be sitting here. Never, ever, ever. Wasn't even on the map. And what a joy this is. What an unexpected joy. So even using hope as a motivator, you know, kind of things will get better kind of idea, never would have given me this joyful experience. I've asked very... friends of mine, to help me understand hope. And I get quotations and poems, and people send me things advocating for one side or the other. But I asked a friend here at Green Gulch the other day, and she gave me this quote from T.S. Eliot. It says, I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

[18:09]

That's part of a longer... stanza that goes into other aspects that are love would be love for the wrong thing, etc. But that pretty much says what I was just aiming at, is that why limit ourselves? Why limit ourselves? Even if we're hoping that the pain stops, it might stop sooner than we hope. We're so busy worrying how long it's going to last, we don't notice that it actually stopped for a minute. I have a lot of physical pain when I walk And people ask me all the time, are you in pain? Are you in pain? And I actually, I focus much more on the time I'm not. Like, I'm not in pain at all right now. And there are many moments in a step that aren't painful. And there are a few moments that are. And that, of course, this study has been greatly, I feel like I'm selling zazen today, but this study ability to actually watch the time between the pain and be present for either the neutral feelings or the pleasant feelings in the midst is greatly helped by sitting still for a while.

[19:23]

So I offer that to you. I want to read another poem which brings up the danger of hope to me, the leaning into the future part of hope. which puts us way off balance. And it's a pretty strong poem, so it's not very long. It's by a man named Mark Doty, and it's part of a poem called Atlantis, which has many, many verses, and this is the first section. It goes like this. I've been having these awful dreams. We're walking in a field, Wally and Arden and I, a stretch of grass with a highway running beside it, or a path in the wood that opens onto a road. Everything's fine. Then the dog sprints ahead of us, excited. We're calling, but he's racing down the scent, and he doesn't hear us, and that's when he goes onto the highway.

[20:29]

I don't want to describe it. Sometimes it's brutal and over... and other times he's struck and takes off and we don't know where he is or how bad. This wakes me every night now and I stay awake. I'm afraid if I sleep, I'll go back into the dream. It's been six months, almost exactly, since the doctor wrote not even a real word, but an acronym, a vacant four-letter cipher that draws meaning unto itself and reconstitutes the world. We tried to say it was just a word. We tried to admit it had power and thus to mollify it by means of our acknowledgement, a strategy. I know the current wisdom, bright hope, the power of wishing you're well. He's just so tired, though nothing shows in any tests, nothing the doctor says detectable.

[21:32]

The doctor doesn't hear what I do. And I swear sometimes when I put my head to his chest, I can hear the virus humming like a refrigerator, which is what makes me think you can take your positive attitude and go straight to hell. We don't have a future. We have a dog. Who is he? Soul without speech, sheer, tireless faith. He's that which goes forward. Black muzzle, black pause, scouting what's ahead. He is what will be hit first. He's the part of us that's going to get it. We can be really hurt by the kind of hope that hopes for something that isn't happening.

[22:38]

Because hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. Hope is to get away from fear, this kind of hope, this kind of hope that I'm talking about here. And as long as there's one, there's the other. What are some of the helpful aspects of hope? Well, for me, when I think about hope, I feel just in my body a lifting of the heart. If you think about it, I don't know how it is for you, but for me, just the idea of, ah, hope, ah, hope, which part of it, you know, the in or the out breath, that there's a sparkly, feeling in my heart a light light in my heart and it lifts it lifts and I think that's helpful I think that's very helpful and how high it lifts may depend on how low it is so it's a subtle thing it's a very subtle thing but I think that is a necessary part of of of

[24:10]

uprighting ourselves, of balancing ourselves in this life where we can easily step in a hole. So the lifting of the heart, just without content, without I hope that this will happen. It's more like I just hope. I just have hope. And I think another or helpful aspect of hope is when hope accompanies the impossible. I think that's a wonderful marriage. I think that's a really good balance. And this comes up for me in terms of our bodhisattva vows. So at the end of today and many, many times during the week, we recite these vows. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Bless you.

[25:10]

Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter all of them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. The reason I think we can make these vows is that they're impossible to do. And the very impossibility of doing them lifts them out of the world of doing or not doing. Being lifted out of the world where something can be done or not done is really one of the great gifts of our practice and of these vows. And I have a little personal story about this. Recently, mid-December, I was asked to... turn the focus of my work as vice president of Zen Center towards the development office, towards raising money.

[26:12]

And you may have noticed that this is one of the most difficult financial times of any of our lives, right? And the plans that we have that we've been working on for over 10 years have led us to a point where we're actually ready to have quite a big campaign to help really transform and broaden the offerings that we can make to the world from our three centers and through our practice. And so I thought about this request and I thought, well, I better not think I can do this. I better really be careful here because if I think I can do this, I'm going to be in that office every night until midnight. I'm going to be planning and plotting and strategizing and thinking, what can I do to make this happen? Not that there aren't things to be done, but I thought about this and knowing myself and knowing this kind of doingness that I have in my habits, I decided that the

[27:29]

Only thing I could do with this very, very difficult job I was being asked to do was to make it more difficult. So I got a puppy. That was my solution. And I have to say, it worked. It worked. I had this little being, this adorable little being, that requires me to leave the office. I need to go walk him, walk Jack, his name is Jack. And I need to check in on him at lunch time and I need to let him be in my office with me and not get so serious in the meetings that it's not okay if he's biting the shoelaces of a potential donor. You know, he lightens my heart and he gives me a kind of an external reality to take care of, to actually take care of this being. And he makes the idea that I can actually do this job impossible.

[28:36]

And so as a result, the job is delightful. I'm having a wonderful time. I don't know whether this job can be done or not. It doesn't matter. This is what we're doing. This is what we're all doing together. And so in a way, that's the hopelessness of it. The impossibility of it frees me completely. I don't know what's going to happen. It's not happening through my efforts. It's going to arise appropriately. It will arise appropriately. So I offer that to you as a solution. If something is really, really difficult, make it impossible. I also want to say that I was giving a similar talk like this recently. I was invited to go to Ireland, and I was able to be there for a week and be with some of the people who've been meditating in Northern Ireland, and someone brought up the idea of, well, optimism.

[29:40]

What about optimism? I feel like I'm a very optimistic person, and I actually think optimism is different than hope, at least the kind of hope I'm talking about. So I am not saying that optimism is harmful. I'm not saying that. Optimism to me goes along with the lifting of the heart. And there's also a sense of action in there, not the kind of wistfulness, sort of relegating oneself to just a wish arising and then not following through in any way to the extent that we can, that we can be a person whose activity contributes to the situation. So I'm not saying that hope and optimism are the same. I mean, the Buddha helped us see the discoveries he made that there is an end of suffering.

[30:42]

There is an end to suffering. And then he gave us a path. A path. He also said, don't believe me, check it out for yourself, which is actually an activity. So it's not just, oh, suffering can end, therefore I'm just going to keep hoping that it'll end. There's actually skillful means to work with, and that's part of the offering of Buddhists. That's Buddha's offering to us, is the path. Here's another little quote from Rebecca Solnit about the kind of hope that I think might be more helpful. She says, and this is from a book called Hope in the Dark, Hope is not like a lottery ticket. You can sit on the sofa and clutch feeling lucky. Hope is an act you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed,

[31:45]

Hope calls for action. Action is impossible without hope. I'm not so sure about that. I'm not so sure about that last statement. But I have that feeling of passivity versus responding in an uplifted way, in a way that says this could be a healthy, wholesome situation and I'm going to contribute to that. That's the kind of helpful hope But the key, I think, is what she says and then what Eric Fromm says, too. He says, hope is to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born. And yet, not become desperate if there's no birth in our lifetime. Again, putting it out beyond your capability to make it happen or not make it happen, I think, is the balance that hope requires. No expectations.

[32:47]

no gaining idea, and yet, you know, and yet. So I think just the last little thought I want to leave you with is the antidote to fear is not hope. When we look at just, you know, In the political world, it seems like those are the two methodologies that we're presented with. We're either supposed to be really afraid or really hopeful, right? So the antidote to fear is not hope. It's loving acceptance. And how can we tell if the hope that's arising in us is helpful or unhelpful, wholesome or unwholesome?

[33:55]

I think we ask the question, is it motivated by love or is it motivated by fear? That's the context that I suggest to you. Check it out. Is the hope coming from fear that something bad is going to happen? Or is it coming out of love? Because there are only two feelings, love and fear. There are only two languages, love and fear. There are only two activities, love and fear. There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results, love and fear.

[35:02]

Love and fear. Thank you.

[35:09]

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